BY GERALD STANLEY LEE 



THE SHADOW CHRIST. 

A Study of the Hebrew Men of Genius. 

THE LOST ART OF READING. 

A Sketch of Civilization. 

THE CHILD AND THE BOOK. 

A Constructive Criticism of Education. 

ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND 
CHURCH. 

A Picture of the Good Old Days. 

ROUND WORLD SERIES: 

I. THE VOICE OF THE MACHINES. 
An Introduction to the 20th Century. 
II. INSPIRED MILLIONAIRES. A Study 
of Men of Genius in Business. 

III. CROWDS. A Moving Picture of 

Democracy. 

IV. WE. A Recommendation of the First 

Person Plural for the use of Men and 
Nations. 

MOUNT TOM. 

A Little Look-off on the World. 



THE AIR-LINE 
TO LIBERTY 

A PROSPECTUS FOR ALL NATIONS 
BY 

GERALD STANLEY LEE 

[EDITOR OF "MOUNT TOM"] 




NEW YORK 

MITCHELL KENNERLEY 

MCMXVIII 






n.** 



COPYRIGHT I918 BY 
GERALD STANLEY LEE 



APR 23 1918 
©CU497027 



^^o I 



TO 

JENNETTE LEE 

THIS BOOK 

AND WITH IT 

THE ELEVENTH VERSE OF SOLOMON'S 

SECOND SONG 



CONTENTS 



THE AIR-LINE TO LIBERTY 



I. Liberty for What? 
II. Who Must Get Out of the Way 
First? . . . 

III. Cutting Past the Kaiser 

IV. In - Under - Up - Over - Around - and 

Through 

V. The Art of Making Nations Look 
VI. Thanks to the Kaiser for Making Us 

See What We Want 
VII. Thanks to the Allies for Making Us 

See What We Want 
VIII. The Short-Cut to Victory . 
IX. The Air-Line to Peace 
X. What People Can Do First 
XI. End of Advertisement One . 



6 
ii 

13 

24 

32 

42 
52 
58 
69 
79 



II 

AMERICA AND GERMANY 

I. Cross-circuited Newspapers . . 83 
II. Winning Away Germany's Initiative . 94 
III. Winning the War and Germany To- 
gether 107 



x Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

IV. Winning the World and Germany 

Together 114 

V. No Halfness, No Hemming and Haw- 
ing, No Twiddling with Peace . 116 



III 

AMERICA, HER ALLIES AND THE 
WORLD 

I. The Kind of America America Wants 127 
II. The Kind of America Europe Wants 131 

III. The Kind of War Department 

America Would Like . . 137 

IV. A Programme for Getting the Kind 

of a War Department America 

Would Like 149 

V. Business Men, Advertising Men and 

War 161 

VI. The Anti-Toxin of War . . .165 

VII. The Spinal Column of Peace . . 169 

VIII. Fighting It Out 173 



IV 





A DECLARATION OF FAITH FOR 






NATIONS 




I. 


A Confession of Peace . 


179 


II. 


A Confession of Hope . 


185 


III. 


A Confession of Faith . 


189 


IV. 


A Definition Before Action 


192 


V. 


The Creed of the Salesmen 


194 



Contents xi 



V 



THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN 
AMERICA 



CHAPTER 



I. Mobilizing Newspapers 

II. Mobilizing Magazines . 

III. Mobilizing Authors and "Prophets" 

IV. Mobilizing Government Officials 
V. Mobilizing Statesmen . 



VII 
FIGHTING TO A FINISH 

I. Finding the Range 

II. Arming a Hundred Million People 

III. News Dynamos .... 

IV. Central Power House . 

V. The Engineers of Silence . 
VI. The Lords of Attention ' . 



PAGE 



I. The Kaiser is Looking . . . .203 
II. The President is Looking . . .207 

III. Nations Wait 210 

IV. The Hundred Millionth of a Man 213 
V. The Nation Takes a Hundred Mil- 
lion Look 221 



VI 
MAKING DEMOCRACY WORK 



225 
238 

245 
268 
281 



289 
295 
305 
308 
3i3 
318 



xii Contents 



VIII 

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN 
EUROPE 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. America Goes Calling . . . .321 
II. The New World-Game . . . 324 

III. The End of the Self-Sufficient 

Nation 333 

IV. A Little Coal Shall Lead Us . . 338 



IX 

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN 
GERMANY 

I. Undelivered Letters . . . .341 
II. The Right to Change Each Other's 

Minds 351 

III. Looking and Trying .... 355 

IV. Listening 359 

V. A Billion Dollars' Worth of Listen- 
ing 361 

VI. The President, the People and the 

World 362 

Note 371 

Epilogue 
Going to Press 



I 

THE AIR-LINE TO LIBERTY 
Chapter I 

LIBERTY FOR WHAT? 

A MAN who was reading his paper by 
the door in the barber shop yesterday, 
heard his turn called out, threw his paper 
down, came up to the chair next mine, swung 
up his feet, settled down his head and said, 
"I see the Government has borrowed seven- 
teen billion dollars this year — just for this 
year — to defend Liberty." 

The man who was putting a bib on me and 
counting on cutting my hair, whistled softly. 

I said nothing. I began thinking. 

Who is the liberty for? 

Children. Some of them may live long 
enough perhaps — may hope to get some of it. 



2 The Air-Line to Liberty 

I began figuring. 

Liberty comes high since Germany began. 
Reckoning for children — for children three 
thousand miles away — the right to be free 
costs fourteen hundred dollars apiece this 
year. Reckoning for babies (and practically 
only children under three will collect on lib- 
erty) every baby in this country is having five 
thousand two hundred and sixty-six dollars 
spent by our Government on his liberty this 
year. 

It ought to make a baby thoughtful to 
know it's costing somebody five thousand two 
hundred and sixty-six dollars a year. 

When I came out of the barber shop I came 
plump on a baby in its go-cart rolling in the 
sun down Shop Row. 

"The Government is spending five thousand 
two hundred and sixty-six dollars a year on 
you — on your liberty just for this year!" I 
thought at it as I looked at its little hopeful 
vague round face. 

Then I walked on. 

Liberty for a baby in America one hundred 
dollars a week! 



Liberty for What? 3 

Any baby. 

About fifteen dollars a day. 

Does the baby earn fifteen dollars a day? 

Who is paying fifteen dollars a day for the 
baby's liberty? 

If the war lasts four years the liberty the 
baby has will cost America — for this particu- 
lar four years — about twenty-one thousand 
dollars. 

Is the baby going to pay the $5,266 a year 
back? 

Is the baby's liberty worth $5,266 a year? 

What will the liberty — all this liberty that 
is being held on to so tightly for the baby — be 
like when he gets it? 

What will he do with it? 

Will he join the I. W. W. when we have 
spent — say twenty-one thousand dollars on his 
liberty? 

This afternoon I came home through The 
Public Gardens and near the Pond and around 
the paths and benches I saw babies everywhere 
and flocks of go-carts — every one of them — 
every one in sight having that very hour sixty 
cents an hour spent on him for his liberty, by 



4 The Air-Line to Liberty 

our Government. Sixty cents an hour asleep 
or awake! A cent a minute for his liberty be- 
ing handed out to him asleep or awake, by 
The United States. 

Fifteen dollars to-day. 

Fifteen dollars more to-morrow. Fifteen 
dollars more day after to-morrow — every day 
all the year — what is it all for? 

What are we doing it for? 

What is America driving at in doing it? 

This book is to find out. 

I want to put down in plain black and white 
if I can, what the liberty is for, and what it is 
like — at fifteen dollars a day. 

I am full of enthusiasm for spending the fif- 
teen dollars a day for the liberty. 

But liberty for what? What right are 
American men, women and children spending 
seventeen billion dollars a year to get? 

The right to advertise in Germany. 

This is what it amounts to. The war is over 
and liberty is secured and held down for all 
of us the moment we can get certain facts about 
America and Americans over where the Ger- 



Liberty for What? 5 

mans can see them — the moment we touch the 
imagination of the German people. 
What shall we advertise in Germany? 

First Advertisement. 

American guns. (Advertisement under Pershing.) 
"You have said in Germany that you despise us in Amer- 
ica, that you do not respect us, will not listen to us, will 
not deal with us except as your inferiors in the material 
world. We will advertise to you that we are materially 
fit to take the leadership over you in the modern material 
world. You will not listen to any other advertisement 
from America. So here it is." 

WE CAN WHIP YOU WITH OUR GUNS. 

This is our first advertisement. 

Second Advertisement. 
WE CAN WHIP YOU WITH OUR SOULS. 

We will advertise to you by the way we carry on and 
the way we end this war, that we are spiritually, intel- 
lectually and politically fit to take the precedence of you 
in the intellectual and political leadership of the world. 

Third Advertisement. 

AMERICA'S SUBSTITUTE FOR WAR— AFTER 
THIS ONE IS ENDED RIGHT 



6 Chapter II 

WHO MUST GET OUT OF THE WAY FIRST? 

OF course the main difficulty we are go- 
ing to come up against when we Ameri- 
cans try to drive our advertising in through 
to the German people, is that the Kaiser has 
got his advertising in first. 

In competing with the Kaiser, we Ameri- 
cans will have to compete — so far as his local 
field is concerned — with the best advertising 
man on earth. No advertising any one ever 
dreamed of is like the Kaiser's. It is taking 
twenty nations to whip the Germans because 
the Kaiser begins his advertising with people 
when they are babies. 

Before their fathers and mothers have met, 
the educating of babies and the advertising of 
babies begins in Germany. The advertising 
of obedience in Germany begins in the womb. 
It is idle to think of Wilhelm II as a splendid 
national decoration, a kind of royal image for 
the German people. 

In his own field he is the greatest nation- 
engineer, the greatest attention-engineer or 
statesman the world has known. All day, all 



Who Must Get Out of the Way First? 7 

night, all the years of their lives, the Kaiser 
touches the imaginations of all of his people. 
He is the horizon of their news, the sky-line 
of their thoughts and he has laid mines in the 
ground, deep underneath their lives. The 
tone he takes with them, instead of being the- 
atrical is real. He has obsessed the imagina- 
tion of the Germans and jammed down his 
soul on them as the Lid of the Country. 

The Kaiser stands out to-day as the main 
fact that the world has to face for the next 
hundred years because he has believed in ad- 
vertising. 

If the people of the other nations, of the 
great democracies, had a twentieth of the grim 
spiritual faith in advertising, in touching and 
gripping men's imaginations, — the imaging, 
visualizing, driving forces in men, the Kaiser 
has, we should not be paying as we are in 
America now, several hundred dollars a year 
apiece to hold back the imagination of the 
Germans about Germany, hew it back, and 
coop it up so that the rest of the world will be 
worth living in. 



8 The Air-Line to Liberty 

The way for the world to beat Germany is 
for each nation of the Allies to advertise its 
own people together as well as the Kaiser has 
advertised his together. 

Then we will advertise in Germany. 

What we are fighting the German people 
for is to get the German people to let us ad- 
vertise in Germany. We propose to put be- 
fore the Germans our advertisement of the 
kind of modern world we want and how we 
want to get it, alongside their Kaiser's modern 
world — the one he is giving them now. On 
these two great advertisements of worlds — 
the Kaiser's world and our world side by side, 
day by day, before the eyes of the German 
people, civilization to-day hangs by a thread. 

Is there any possible thing America when 
she gazes at the Kaiser's advertisement in 
Germany — the Kaiser's huge billboard two 
hundred thousand miles square — can do to 
get her advertisement of a world to the Ger- 
man people in, under, over or around the 
Kaiser's advertisement? 

What is there that America can do and do 



Who Must Get Out of the Way First? 9 

now to arrest, hold and possess the imagina- 
tion of the German people, remove them for- 
ever from being a vast, stupid, innocent threat 
to the world, and establish peace? 



io Chapter III 

CUTTING PAST THE KAISER 

THIS brings me to my invention. 
The quickest way to get the attention of 
the German people during this war is to pro- 
pose a substitute for it. 

It is also the quickest way to get the atten- 
tion of all the peoples, and to get all the 
peoples to act together and to act intelligently, 
hopefully and implacably against the German 
Government. 

I do not ask the reader in this one short 
chapter to believe that the invention of a sub- 
stitute for war is possible. 

But supposing it were possible and that a 
good working substitute for war had been in- 
vented and lay in our hands, most of us are 
agreed that the best, quickest and most pointed 
thing America could do with a good working 
substitute for war would be to see that all the 
nations in this one, know about it at once. 

The best thing the nations can do with a 
good working substitute for war when they 
know of it, is to use it to stop this one. 

Supposing that America had her invention 



Cutting Past the Kaiser II 

of a substitute for war well in hand and be- 
lieved in it, what would be the best possible 
way to advertise it to the other nations and 
to get them to adopt it? 

The best way for America to get her sub- 
stitute for war adopted by other nations would 
be to keep rather still about it, keep from the- 
orizing or moralizing about it and try it out. 

Try it out where everybody is looking. 

It should be introduced in the one nation 
out of us all that the other nations are watch- 
ing and studying, the nation in which every- 
body knows that a substitute for war would 
work the worst. 

Then we will make it work. 

The way for America to get the most and 
the best advertising among the nations for a 
substitute for war just now, would be to in- 
troduce it in Germany. 

If America will go ahead and set up her 
substitute for war in Germany and have it 
working and working successfully in Germany 
before everybody's eyes, side by side with war 
and while war is still going on, the adoption 
of America's substitute for war by the other 



12 The Air-Line to Liberty 

nations when the war stops, will take care of 
itself. 

If we can stop a war like this one with it, 
we can stop any war with it, and everybody 
will believe in it. The victory we all say we 
are fighting for, — namely something that will 
forever take the place of war, will have been 
won. 

And not only the war but the war after the 
war will have been won. The thing that makes 
us dread peace to-day more than death, the 
terror that hangs over us all now all day and 
all night — the huge hiatus of twenty nations 
hemming and hawing while the peoples perish 
— will be skipped. 



Chapter IV 13 

IN-UNDER-UP-OVER- AROUND-AND-THROUGH 

THE most effectual substitute for war for 
America to propose to the nations will 
be a substitute that the Germans will be as 
much interested as we are, in putting through. 

One way for America and the Allies to 
do at present is to proceed to crush militar- 
ism out of Germany all alone, and the other 
way is for America and the Allies to propose 
to the Germans (while still crushing) a sub- 
stitute for militarism which will compel the 
Germans to help us crush it. 

It will take five times as long to insist on 
crushing militarism out of Germany without 
the Germans to help, as it will with the Ger- 
mans to help. 

With half of the Germans to help, mili- 
tarism can be crushed out of Germany. With- 
out half of the Germans to help, militarism 
will have to be nibbled out of Germany. 

The proposition I have to make to Amer- 
ica and the Allies, is that from now on we 
stop nibbling. It is time to begin crushing. 
It is time to get half of the Germans to help. 



14 The Air-Line to Liberty 

How can America and the Allies get half 
of the Germans to help? 

Half of the Germans are fighting for con- 
quest. The other half are fighting for what 
they fear we will do to them if they stop. 

Why not advertise to them what we will do 
to them if they stop? 

The American people will cut in past the 
Kaiser's newspapers, get word through direct 
to the German people in the cities villages 
and fields. The American people will not let 
the German people be put off with what the 
Kaiser tells them we are fighting for. We will 
advertise to them what we are fighting for our- 
selves. 

America will let every man, woman and 
child in Germany know that what we are 
fighting for is to introduce our substitute for 
war. 

But I was going to speak of my invention. 

The invention I want America to adopt and 
introduce among the nations as America's in- 
vention for ending this war and for ending all 
wars, is the exchange — the cooperative and 



In-under-up-over-around-and-Throngh 15 

organized exchange of advertising campaigns 
between nations. 

America will propose that the money and 
the men nations spend in ordinary times on 
armies and navies and on being ready to mis- 
understand, be spent on advertising and un- 
derstanding. 

America instead of being theoretical and 
explaining and moralizing and exploterating 
about this idea, will use it. 

Germany first. 

I wish to be specific. Winning this war 
with Germany is a matter of advertising in 
Germany what we are going to do with Ger- 
mans after we win it. 

What we do to-day, if we do it well, turns 
on our advertising to Germans what we are 
going to do to-morrow. 

What does America think it is going to do 
to-morrow? 

That is to say: What is it America is de- 
ciding is its substitute for war? What is it 
we are proposing to the Germans to put in 
the place of what we have now? 

Let us advertise at home and find out. 



1 6 The Air -Line to Liberty 

Then let us advertise in Germany and let 
the Germans find out. 

Germany is not curious what Americans 
think about everything. But if we have in 
America a spark of an idea in our minds of a 
substitute for this war, there will not merely 
be a strong draught on it in Germany. 

Germans will stand up in rows all over 
Germany and blow on it. 

Some of us in America and among the Al- 
lies seem to think that it is our victory Ger- 
many at the present moment is fighting on and 
fighting on against. But it is not our victory 
Germany at the present moment is fighting 
against. It is what she fears we will do with 
our victory when we get it. 

The war turns now on our letting Germany 
know what we will do with our victory when 
we get it. 

America's problem in Germany is a prob- 
lem in advertising while shooting. 

We will propose and advertise in Germany 
at once a substitute for war Germany will feel 
safe with. 



In-under-up-over-around-and-Through 17 

If we let every man, woman and child in 
Germany know that we are fighting to substi- 
tute advertisement and experiment between 
nations for censorship and explosion, half of 
the Germans will help. 

Perhaps nine out of ten of the German 
people — to put it mildly — would prefer this 
as much as the American people do. If the 
German people knew clearly that this is what 
we were fighting for, how hungry and how 
dead would how many of them want to be, 
just to keep up their present right not to be 
listened to by Americans and not to listen to 
Americans when they like? 

I am not saying that as a matter of practical 
working psychology for an American in deal- 
ing with a German just now, I am in favor of 
stopping a gun to talk. It would not be tact- 
ful. The German would misunderstand and 
the American would blow up. The thing I 
favor for America just now is double-quick 
firing — news with one hand and shrapnel with 
the other. The people of America will send 
out to the people of the enemy country an in- 
vitation, — what might be called a shooting in- 



1 8 The Air-Line to Liberty 

vitation to talk. We will say to the Germans, 
"We are going to shoot at you three, four and 
five times as hard while we talk, but we invite 
you to talk." 

The Germans have repeatedly gone through 
the form of saying to us in America that they 
want to talk with us, but the suitable and tact- 
ful way to consent to talk with Germans now 
is to shoot our consent at them. We will blast 
their talk out of them. We will blast our talk 
into them but we will talk. The way to talk 
with Germans now is to underline words with 
howitzers. As long as words with howitzers 
keep on meaning one thing to a German and 
the same words without howitzers keep on 
meaning another, we will keep on having guns 
enough to say precisely what we mean. We 
have made up our minds after three years of 
trying to talk with Germans, that this time we 
will not be misunderstood. 

If they misunderstand our advertisements 
we will face them with the guns. If they mis- 
understand our guns we will face them with 
our advertisements. But the guns and the ad- 



In-under-up-over-around-and-Through 19 

vertisements will both be for the same thing — 
the getting of the attention of Germans. 

People say we must concentrate on to-day 
first, that we must concentrate on putting an 
end to militarism in Germany. 

I agree that there is nothing else to concen- 
trate on now, but to put an end to militarism 
in Germany. 

But there are two ways to concentrate on 
putting an end to militarism in Germany. 
One way is to concentrate on crushing mili- 
tarism out of Germany in a plain slow stodgy 
way — with guns. And the other way is to 
give the Germans something to compare with, 
crushing to concentrate on advertising in Ger- 
many a substitute for it, which on comparing 
notes they may like better and which if ad- 
vertised on time in Germany and while the 
crushing is still going on, may make fifty or 
a hundred billion dollars worth of crushing 
unnecessary. 

Most of the problems that centre about get- 
ting America's first advertisement through 
into Germany — the news to the Germans 
about Americans guns, are already well in 



20 The Air-Line to Liberty 

hand. We know how they are coming out 
and have trusted them to our experts. 

It is the problems that centre about the 
other two advertisements — the advertisements 
that we can whip the Germans with our souls, 
and the advertisement of our substitute for 
war, on which we now need to catch up and 
which we need to put in the hands of experts 
next. 

We will make definite arrangements to be- 
gin shooting not only war but our substitute 
for war at Germany at the same time. "What 
America is fighting for" our guns shall say, 
"is the right of Americans to be listened to in 
Germany and the right of Germans to be lis- 
tened to in America." 

America will get under way her prelimi- 
nary arrangements to set up her advertising 
exchanges with nations. 

America will propose each nation's adver- 
tising among its own people until it finds out 
what the things are people do to them which 
make them want to fight. 

After their private home-advertising na- 
tions will get together, pick out the war- 



In-under-up'Over-around-and-Through 21 

causes in each nation, isolate them, put them 
on a slide, look at them together, find out 
just how they breed and then take them up 
point by point, fear by fear, war-germ by war- 
germ, — the way any scientist in human nature 
would — and advertise them out of the way. 

We will advocate making international ar- 
rangements for doing this mutual advertising 
on a colossal scale. We will place it in the 
hands of experts in touching the imaginations 
of crowds and of great groups of people. We 
will make moving pictures of nations and 
plays of cities. Mighty peoples — with the 
wireless telegraph, the wireless telephone, the 
phonograph, the moving picture — all our co- 
lossal modern engines for crowds hearing to- 
gether and seeing together, all our stupendous 
inventions for common vision and for common 
hope, — mighty peoples shall be intimate with 
each other. 

But this is another story. To come back 
to the beginning and get down to Germans, 
and to talking business with Germans: We 
will get ready to send over to the German 
people in their cities and their villages and 



22 The Air-Line to Liberty 

their fields, by air-plane, the first possible 
minute, some little word direct to the German 
people as to what we are fighting for. They 
are shooting us to get territory, and we are 
shooting them — we will tell them — because 
they have said it is the way we will have 
to get their attention first. 

Your Kaiser has arranged things so that the only way 
we can advertise to you and get word through to you is 
to shoot you until you listen to us, or to shoot your Kaiser 
until he will let you listen to us. 

Your Kaiser has made up his mind that it is safer for 
him to stand you up and let us shoot at you than it is for 
him to let us talk with you. 

But why do you suppose it is that your Kaiser insists 
on telling you what we are righting for, himself, insists on 
telling you privately and in his own words ? Why should 
we not tell you ourselves — what we are fighting for? 

Why should you be in danger of being shot if you are 
caught picking this little advertisement up out of the 
street or out of the field? Why will your Kaiser be 
obliged unless he looks out — to mow you Germans down 
in rows for reading this ? 

As long as you are afraid of your Kaiser there is noth- 
ing for us to do but to keep on fighting him and crushing 
him until you are more afraid of us. 



In-under-up-over-around-and-Through 23 
And this: 

What we are fighting you for is to propose a substitute 
to you for what we are doing now. What we are fighting 
you for is to get you to substitute with us millions of dol- 
lars worth of advertising a day for millions of dollars 
worth of killing a day. 

Which do you prefer — you the German people in deal- 
ing with us the American people — advertisements or ex- 
plosions? This is what our guns are saying to you, 
"Which do you prefer in dealing with us, oh Germans, 
your German Gutenbergs or your German Krupps? 

The sons of Washington and Lincoln to the sons of 
Beethoven, Schiller, Luther, Goethe and Gutenberg send 
greetings!" 



24 Chapter V 

THE ART OF MAKING NATIONS LOOK 

THIS war in the last analysis and in its 
final victory is a competition in adver- 
tisements. We are attending for the last four 
years a vast international tournament of na- 
tions trying to get each other's attention. 

Why did the Germans take, in one huge, un- 
speakable battle, a hundred and eighty thou- 
sand prisoners and fifteen hundred guns from 
the Italians? 

Because France and England had not had 
their imaginations touched about Italy — 
about what Italy could do and was already 
doing to cut out Austria from under Germany 
and end the war. 

Of course, Italy has touched the imagina- 
tions of France and England now. 

But why did Italy wait and sacrifice fifteen 
hundred guns and a hundred and eighty thou- 
sand men to do it? 

Because her campaign was being conducted 
by specialists in fighting and she had made no 
equally commanding provision for getting the 
attention of France and England in time to 



The Art of Making Nations Look 2$ 

help. What Italy arranged for was a precise 
and elaborate touching of the imagination of 
France and England too late. 

Italy had invented a way of ending the war 
but she had invented no way of advertising it 
so that the invention could be used. 

Nearly all of the great crises of the war 
have been (either at home or abroad) — ad- 
vertising crises. When people have succeeded 
it was because somebody's attention was got on 
time and when they have failed it was because 
they tried to do a thing before enough people's 
attention had been got to it, to make it work. 

Most of the blunders of the war have been 
due to overheated specialists with eyes 
screwed down to the one idea or to the one 
place, whose attention could not be got to the 
other ideas or places until it was too late. 

The violation of Belgium which was Ger- 
many's most stupid military blunder, which 
raised and equipped the soldiers of twenty na- 
tions against her instead of two, was due to 
military specialists whose attention could not 
be got as to how human nature would take 
striking Belgium in the back. The North 



26 The Air-Line to Liberty 

German Lloyd people in Germany, the big 
business or salesmen type of men who knew 
human nature the most, could have prevented 
Germany's making her greatest blunder, if 
they could have got the attention of the Ger- 
man General Staff in time and told the Ger- 
man General Staff that they were overlooking 
the inflammable nature of human nature and 
were deliberately, by touching Belgium, pull- 
ing on themselves the trigger of the world. 

If all the great crises of this war have been 
advertising crises, if all the military successes 
have been founded on advertising successes 
and all the big military failures founded on 
advertising failures, why should not the great 
nations on both sides take the hint as to what 
the war really is a competition in, and proceed 
from now on to take the battle in touching 
each other's imaginations as seriously as they 
do the battle of blowing each other up? 

It is all that we are coming to in the end 
anyway — advertising. Whatever kind of end 
we come to and whatever plan we get all na- 
tions to accept to establish peace, will have to 



The Art of Making Nations Look 27 

depend on advertising to get people to accept 
it and advertising to operate it. 

Some of us put our trust in national disarm- 
ament, but national disarmament will not be 
safe without advertising to get it, and without 
advertising how a substitute for national arm- 
ament can be had, and how it can be operated. 

Some of us put our trust in reduction of na- 
tional armaments, but reduced national arma- 
ments will not be possible without advertising 
how to reduce, and how much to reduce and 
what shall be each nation's proportion. 

Some of us put our trust in international 
armament or world police, but international 
armament or world police can only be insti- 
tuted, backed up and made effectual by keep- 
ing all peoples informed of mutual interests 
and showing them what the mutual interests 
are, that they need to have world police to 
protect, and making them want to protect 
them. 

Some of us put our trust in an International 
Court to administer the world, but the Inter- 
national Court which we might use to back up 
our international police, could only secure its 



28 The Air-Line to Liberty 

appointment, its authority and its working 
prestige, by being advertised to all peoples — 
by being believed in enough to work. 

Some of us put our trust in treaties and in 
scraps of paper in abstract words written by 
lawyers, but treaties to establish peace which 
are not backed up in detail by advertisements 
removing the causes of war, will be more vis- 
ionary than they have been before. Before 
the war, treaties worked after a dull, empty 
fashion because people believed in them, but 
nobody believes in treaties now. Their fail- 
ure has been advertised to the ends of the 
earth. 

Some of us put our trust in what we have 
tried already — a balance of power between 
two great contending forces among the na- 
tions. But if a balance of power is going to 
be made to work in some other way than it 
has been working the last four years, it can 
only be made to work by having one great na- 
tion on each side touch the imagination of all 
the other nations on its side — and the nations 
on the other side — so that it will be possible 
to get a balance of power set up. 



The Art of Making Nations Look 29 

What the war is going to end in is a huge 
Advertising Clearing House for the World. 
The nations that discover that this is true and 
that start the Clearing House first and make 
it work first, will be the nations that will win 
for their civilization its way with the world. 

Advertising will make disarmament safe 
because it will be a working method of remov- 
ing the causes of war. 

Advertising will make International Police 
safe because we will advertise into being a 
moral centre of mutual interests the Police 
can represent. 

Advertising will make a decision of an In- 
ternational Court a working decision because 
it is the only way in which the people who 
will have to abide by the decisions of an In- 
ternational Court can be got to see why they 

should. 

. • • • • 

I have tried to express what seem to me 
good reasons for America's adoption and in- 
troduction of advertising as a substitute for 
war in running the affairs of the world. 

Advertising is essentially an American idea 



30 The Air-Line to Liberty 

— a working method of putting efficiency and 
liberty together and of getting unity of action 
without force. 

I would like to consider the details as to 
how America can now send over into Germany 
its first advertisement of advertising as a sub- 
stitute for war. How can we best manage at 
just this juncture, to send over into Germany 
what might be called our shooting invitation 
to talk? 

If America can touch the imagination of 
Germany at just this juncture with what 
Americans want and what Americans are like 
one-tenth as well as Germany has touched the 
imagination of America with what Germans 
want and with what Germans are like, we 
will have made our great flank movement on 
Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the Kaiser and 
will have found our short-cut to winning the 
war. 

But before asking the reader to consider 
my way of having America advertise in Ger- 
many perhaps it will be interesting to consider 
what can be learned by America from the way 



The Art of Making Nations Look 31 

Germany on the one hand and The Allies on 
the other, have advertised to us. 

The advertising that we do, now that the 
world is looking to us, must be advertising 
that fits definitely in to what has been already 
done and that brings to its logical climax the 
advertising that Germany and The Allies have 
begun. Our advertising must begin where 
theirs leaves off. Where does theirs leave off? 
What kind of advertising is it that Germany 
and The Allies are pointing out to America 
at just this time, to do or not to do? 



32 Chapter VI 

THANKS TO THE KAISER FOR MAKING US SEE 
WHAT WE WANT 

I THANK God every day for the viola- 
tion of Belgium. 

All one could do at first was to wonder why 
He allowed it. But any one who has seen 
how it works and how it is working every day, 
can see why now. 

Only the most stupendous and incredible 
advertisement of Germany — a billboard as 
high as a world, announcing the murder of a 
whole nation, could ever have got the atten- 
tion of England, France and America to what 
Germany was really like. 

There was hardly one of us who knew or 
who even guessed what Germany was really 
like, and we all had to be told — everybody 
even in the remotest corners of the earth had 
to know and know at once or it would have 
been too late. It was not merely because Ger- 
many was hurrying that Belgium was cruci- 
fied. With His face hid and with a great 
shout, God was hurrying. 

None of the nations would have known 



Thanks to the Kaiser 33 

what to do. Every one of them would have 
felt blurred and scatter-minded about Ger- 
many. With good-natured muddling and 
weak hope we would have pottered on. 

But Germany would not let us potter on. 
With one sweep, by one swift blow, by her 
drive through Belgium, Germany hammered 
together, focussed, made self-conscious and 
stupendous the soul and the spiritual might 
of the world. 

And now at last (any man can look about 
him and see it now) the whole world all day, 
all night, every day is noticing God. At last 
the whole world all together as under one 
great roof is praying, singing and working 
with God. It knows what it wants of God. 

This is the first reason I am grateful for 
Germany's opening advertisement, — the one 
in Belgium. Germany has blazed vividly out 
for me a new idea of the place that religion 
really has in the affairs of men. I have al- 
ways believed that the heart of man is sound 
at the core, that religion is the rock bottom 
of the world, but I could not prove it. Ger- 
many has proved it. 



34 The Air-Line to Liberty 

I thank God daily for the violation of Bel- 
gium by Germany for another reason. It has 
given me a new and vivid idea of what effi- 
ciency really is, — of the main element in hu- 
man nature efficiency has to provide for be- 
fore it can be called efficient. I have always 
known that the main element in efficiency is 
the spirit of man. But I have wanted some 
one to prove it. Germany has proved it and 
advertised it. She has proved and advertised 
that only the spiritual works. 

Germany would have been in possession of 
Europe and in practical control of the planet 
at this moment, if she had not in a weak, 
frightened way sneaked across to Paris 
through Belgium. We were prepared in all 
parts of the world to think well of the Ger- 
mans and of their superior fitness in certain 
regards to all of us, and after the first shiver 
of surprise in attack was over, there were 
thousands of millions of people in all nations 
who would not have minded Germany's con- 
trolling the planet, if she had been what 
people thought she was — (at least they would 
not have minded a world's war's worth) but 



Thanks to the Kaiser 35 

when Germany showed herself so visionary 
and so incompetent about human nature as 
to offer herself to us all — as judge and ruler 
of us all by coming out before us and deliber- 
ately and before our eyes stamping on little 
Belgium, we all knew at a glance what would 
have to be done to Germany. It would have 
to be proved once for all to the Germans and 
to all mankind that a nation that could do 
what Germany had done, and had spent forty 
years in deliberately thinking how it would do 
it, and in getting ready to do it, was the most 
colossally inefficient nation on earth. 

We do not deny that Germany in her little 
local Central Europe way in dealing right 
under her own eyes, in Germany with Ger- 
mans — in dealing with the only kind of people 
she has ever really noticed yet, is efficient, but 
the efficiency Germany claims is efficiency in 
dominating a world and efficiency in dominat- 
ing a world turns on seeing a world scientifi- 
cally, on seeing it as it is, and on seeing what 
will work and what will not work with it. 

Any tyro in the science of human nature as 
it exists on this planet at large to-day could 



36 The Air-Line to Liberty 

have told Germany that to begin dominating 
a world and proving that she was fit to domi- 
nate a world by showing herself at the start, 
a coward and a bully, would not work. 

It left nothing for anybody to live for but 
to prove to the Germans and to everybody 
else once for all, that it was a mooning, ego- 
tistic, absent-minded and visionary thing for 
Germany to do — to hold up and shoot up a 
world from behind little Belgium and to 
shove little Belgium in front of her to protect 
her while she did it. 

It has turned out as any matter-of-fact, un- 
sentimental man outside of Germany would 
have seen it would turn out. Germany by one 
telegram pulled the plug out of the world — 
mobilized a world against her. 

I do not see how there can hardly be a man 
left who, after all that has happened, after 
seeing Germany commit suicide by being un- 
scientific and sentimental about herself, can 
seriously keep on calling Germany efficient. 
The arm chair fighter may. One will occa- 
sionally come on a man yet sitting in a cosy 
corner of a club perhaps, who still lets his 



Thanks to the Kaiser 37 

mind keep pattering on about German effi- 
ciency, but with men who observe facts it is 
idle now to call Germany a practical nation, 
when even from a sheer military point of 
view, for every man she killed in Belgium she 
raised up as by enchantment a hundred thou- 
sand soldiers against her — and set their faces — 
their living or dead faces forever against her. 
In England, Russia, Italy, America and 
Japan it was Germany herself who advertised 
for troops to come out and crush her. "Come 
and crush me!" she shouted in the same great 
blind splendid crazy minute in every capital 
of the world. For herself Germany had raised 
an army in forty years. For her enemies she 
raised a hundred armies in a night. It is hard 
to call this efficient. 

And what Germany did in a night with the 
armies of the world she did in the same night 
with their religions. With one single alarm — 
one single, awful clang on the little iron soul 
of Belgium, Germany rang the church bell of 
the earth and all the religions of the earth 
came out to meet her. 



38 The Air -Line to Liberty 

The world was flooded with vision in a 
night. Four hundred million men became 
prophets in a night. We saw God, we saw 
right and wrong with a shout. We cheered 
for God! 

Of course all nations have had moments of 
seeing God. Nations had all looked at God 
separately before. But in Belgium with one 
look all men in all nations saw God. We saw 
with one look hell and heaven opened up side 
by side. And the soul of the world made its 
plain choice forever. 

Some of us who like to put in a good deal 
of our time watching human nature, have come 
to feel that the reason men and nations are not 
good and do not do right is on the whole that 
good and evil are left vague and general and 
are not made striking enough. Millions of 
men are full of evil because evil has never 
been advertised to them alongside the good, 
has never been dramatized on a stupendous 
and colossal scale and in unforgettable con- 
trast placed before them all at once when 
they were all standing and looking together 



Thanks to the Kaiser 39 

and saw Truth blanching each other's faces.. 

The main thing I am grateful to Germany 
for, is that she has performed this great service 
for our modern world. She has acted as God's 
Publicity Agent, and got the whole attention 
of the whole world in all nations at once as 
to what the Devil is like and just how he does 
things, or how he would try to do them if he 
could. 

The advertisement of good and evil along- 
side is so clean-cut and plain that the entire 
planet (except the extreme pacifists, of 
course) is being good. 

It was the German idea of efficiency, the 
idea of getting what one wants by sneaking 
up and attacking a little nation in the back, 
that has precipitated a world into being good. 

America in this war, as it has seemed to me, 
is now engaged in two great enterprises. One 
of them is the more obvious one — the easier 
and quicker one — the task of making the 
world safe for democracy, and the other 
(which she is working on desperately all the 
while underneath), is making democracy safe 
for the world. 



4-0 The Air -Line to Liberty 

The modus operandi for making democracy- 
safe for the world is going to be very largely 
the study and interpretation in all nations of 
the virtues and vices of Germany. 

Germany has the attention of the world for 
a hundred years because she has been thor- 
ough and worked her sins through to their 
logical conclusion, to their full logical ex- 
pression and advertisement. 

The very thought of Germany for a hun- 
dred years is going to fill the churches and 
cathedrals with singing, because with one 
sheer, naked, grim flash of awful plainness 
she has made a world conscious of itself, has 
made a world know what it wants — has made 
a world — with a whole little nation like Bel- 
gium stretched on its cross — see God! 

This war is a competition of advertisements 
— of self revelations of nations and is going to 
be won by the nations that can advertise best. 
The terms of peace are going to be determined 
and arranged by the nations that can advertise 
best. 

If America discovers, reveals, and adver- 



Thanks to the Kaiser 41 

tises herself as honestly as Germany has, the 
world is safe for democracy. 

The question that faces America daily now 
is this. As Germany has touched the imagi- 
nation of America with her revelation of 
what was in her soul, how can America touch 
the imagination of Germany with what is in 
hers? 



42 Chapter VII 

THANKS TO THE ALLIES FOR MAKING US SEE 
WHAT WE WANT 

THE next thing I am thankful for in this 
war, after Germany's advertisement of 
her preparedness to betray and attack the 
world, is the world's advertisement of its un- 
preparedness. 

I was not thankful for the world's unpre- 
paredness at first. But from the point of view 
of The Allies being awarded at the judgment 
bar of mankind, a victorious and overwhelm- 
ing ending to this war I am thankful now. 
From the point of view of securing for The 
Allies the right to make a final and authorita- 
tive settlement of the world, the stupidity, the 
muddleheaded innocence of The Allies 
toward Germany — the unpreparedness of 
The Allies for there being a nation like Ger- 
many at all, or for there being a people like 
the Germans, is the most stupendous convin- 
cing and uncontradictable advertisement Civi- 
lization has ever had. 

The innocence and unpreparedness of The 
Allies in dealing with the treachery Germany 



Thanks to the Allies 43 

had been getting ready for forty years does 
not look like an advantage at the beginning. 
A burglar always has an advantage at the be- 
ginning and always looks much more intelli- 
gent than other people do, at the beginning. 

But after all the most intelligent and most 
important part of a war in which to succeed 
is the end. The mere beginning of the war — 
which we admit the Germans were ready for, 
naturally goes by in time. It is the end now 
slowly looming up ahead when the nations 
will all be sitting around the conference table 
of the world, which is the big end of this war. 

This strange, new, sudden little neighbor- 
hood of nations, where now we all live to-day 
on this sudden, new, one-room little planet 
with a hundred other nations all whirled to- 
gether, all hugged-up and crashed together 
by machines — all unknown to each other, all 
collided into intimacy with each other in a 
few minutes, all obliged to learn how to love 
each other in a few minutes — is going to have 
before very long now, its First Meeting. In 
due time we will be sitting down and facing 



44 The Air-Line to Liberty 

each other around the Conference Table of 
the World. 

Which nations of us all on the whole by 
the self-revelations they have made of their 
powers and their ideas will be decided to be 
best fitted to conceive and to carry out in be- 
half of us all the common interests of man- 
kind? 

The first thing that is going to happen when 
we sit down to the table is that the Germans 
are going to tell everybody that the Ameri- 
cans and The Allies cannot be trusted, and 
America and The Allies are going to tell 
everybody that the Germans cannot be trusted. 

Who is going to be believed? 

It is then that the war — the real war back 
of the war, the one everybody will have to be 
ready for, is going to come off. The leader- 
ship of civilization is going to be awarded by 
the world in favor of the nations which in 
the conduct of this war have shown the most 
consideration and justice, the most power to 
criticise themselves when dealing with others, 
the most national sense of humor and power to 
see themselves as others see them, and the 



Thanks to the Allies 45 

most imagination about people different from 
themselves. 

The nations which have shown the most 
self-control and imagination about others than 
themselves and shown it under the most diffi- 
cult conditions, will be the nations the world 
will decide shall be given the lead in con- 
trolling other nations. 

America and The Allies will claim that 
they have shown more self-control and more 
consideration for the rights of others than 
Germany and her allies, and Germany and her 
allies on their side will put forward the claim 
that they have shown more. 

The Conference Table of the world is go- 
ing to be at first a stalemate of nations saying 
beautiful things about themselves. 

Probably it is not going to make very much 
difference what nations say about themselves. 
It will be the things about nations that any- 
body can see about them that will decide their 
fate at the Conference Table of the World. It 
will be the things they do not need to say. 
What did Germany and what did The Allies 



46 The Air -Line to Liberty 

take for granted — in the way they have con- 
ducted this war? 

Nations and civilizations as well as indi- 
vidual men and women are only judged in this 
world at last by the things they take for 
granted. 

England, France, Russia and America took 
it for granted that Germany would not do the 
things that she has done. Germany took it 
for granted that England and France and 
Russia would and that possibly unless she 
hurried, they would do them first. The de- 
gree in which England, France, Russia and 
America are superior to Germany is the de- 
gree in which they were unprepared for her. 

Germany's preparedness, the preparedness 
of every man, woman and baby in Germany 
to help Germany do what she has done, dooms 
her. 

The nations that have had the most unpre- 
paredness to live in the kind of world Ger- 
many has been giving us the past four years 
are the nations that are the most prepared for 
the end of the war. 

The fact that Germany was prepared for 



Thanks to the Allies /\rj 

just such a world as this of the last four years, 
shows that it is this kind of world — the one 
we are sampling now which she deserves to be 
at the head of. We do not deny — not a single 
nation of us — that it is the kind of world Ger- 
many has more imagination and more far- 
sightedness for, than the rest of us. 

If it is to be the world of the future, let 
her have it. We willingly step one side. We 
do not deny it. In hell we look up to her. 
She is as good as the rest of us three to one. 
We boast of being fooled and unprepared in 
it. We shall boast for a thousand years, of 
being inferior to Germany in the world we 
have now. We will tell our children and our 
children's children that in this kind of a world 
which Germany after forty years' trying has 
at last made up, it was only by time and by 
numbers that other nations could hope to fight 
their way through. 

But while we are fighting we think. 

Germany has made her colossal advertise- 
ment of a world in which she is superior to 
us, and when we have fought our way through 
Germany's world and bring Germany's world 



48 The Air-Line to Liberty 

to a full stop, pull Germany up in a world we 
understand, in which she will be stupid and 
in which she will be afraid, a world in which 
she does not understand anybody but herself, 
we shall have no difficulty in holding Ger- 
many back — in keeping Germany where the 
streets of the world will be safe. 

Germany has made her advertisement of 
her superiority in a world of fighting. Her 
preparedness for it is now her self-confession, 
her creed and her doom. 

Our unpreparedness for it is our clean-cut, 
conclusive advertisement that our civilization 
is a real civilization, that our ideals are sin- 
cere, that the faith we have had in human na- 
ture, even the faith we have had in German 
human nature, is our title to control the earth. 

We, the Unprepared Nations, have proved 
that we have ideals. The bare facts of our 
preoccupation, of our defenselessness which 
no man can deny, prove that we have ideals — 
the ideals that civilization can alone be made 
out of. 

The faith that is deep and high enough and 
matter-of-fact enough to be unprepared for 



Thanks to the Allies 49 

Germany, the faith we have died for, and 
faced annihilation for has it in it to lead the 
prayers and hopes and marshal the powers of 
all true men in all nations, to make a civiliza- 
tion at last — make a civilization now which 
until the bitter joy, the awful literalness of 
its faith had been tested, could only have been 
dreamed. 

Germany's preparedness is the most stupen- 
dous and brutal advertisement of a great na- 
tion's actual religion, of the precise and literal 
measure of faith in its own ideals and in other 
people's that the world has ever seen. In its 
spy-system covering the earth Germany 
breathes out its most secret prayer, its bottom- 
less national fear, its cry to God in the pres- 
ence of its own bottomless national unbelief, 
in the presence of its own weakness and 
treachery — its spiritual pallor in trying to be- 
lieve in the human heart. 

The Germans looked in each other's faces 
and then raised their army. 

The German army is the most colossal ad- 
vertisement of the thorough-going and con- 



50 The Air-Line to Liberty 

vinced fear in the heart of a great people that 
the world has known. 

The outstanding fact that the world is 
struggling with to-day is Fear in Germany. 
It is this fear in Germany, that they have made 
their advertisement of, to the ends of the 
earth. 

It is because this Fear — this spiritual pallor 
in the Germans — is not in the hearts of the 
other peoples that we are going to entrust to 
these other peoples the building of civiliza- 
tion on the earth. 

Germany has offered herself as a candidate 
to rule the earth. 

The world will not consent to be ruled by 
the nation in it that is the most afraid. 

It is to the nation that can believe more 
than other nations believe that the world looks 
to-day. 

It is the nation that is the most quiet and 
relaxed and assured, the nation that looks in 
the face of the world and reads the eyes of 
the world, and is not afraid, that shall lead it. 



Thanks to the Allies 51 

Germany and her Allies and France and 
England and their Allies for three years now 
have been putting forward their advertise- 
ments to the world. We have watched them 
— the two great groups of nations, colossal, 
heroic up against the sky for three years as 
on some vast watershed of Time struggling 
with one another for the attention of a thou- 
sand nations, to turn the stream of the world's 
hope and the world's good will their way. 

And now that the next move in advertising 
or in steering the attention of nations seems 
to have fallen to us I would like to consider 
the details of what America can do to take up 
the advertising that Germany and The Allies 
have already done, bring the war to an over- 
whelming end and establish peace. 

How can America advertise what she wants 
and what she is like to Germany as success- 
fully and as dramatically as Germany has ad- 
vertised what she wants and what she is like 
to us? 



52 Chapter VIII 

THE SHORT-CUT TO VICTORY 

A SMALL object lies before me on my 
desk as I write. 

It is a news-bomb. 

It weighs two ounces loaded. It has two 
pieces of twisted wire to hold it together. It 
has an oil cloth raincoat to keep it dry until 
it goes off. It is a little over two inches long, 
has three narrow explosive newspaper col- 
umns rolled up inside it. It looks when open 
like a kind of cocoon or pea-pod of news. 

A little fleet of a hundred Liberty air-planes 
up over Stuttgart could rain down on the 
streets and public squares and roofs of the city 
two tons of news-bombs in two minutes like 
this one on my desk. It could shower down a 
million and a half greetings to the people of 
Stuttgart from the people of New York in two 
minutes and be off in two minutes more for 
Leipsic. 

Such is the news-bomb on my desk. 

I have been carrying it in my right-hand 
trousers pocket for weeks, next to my knife. 
Every now and then when I am going about 



The Short-Cut to Victory 53 

my hand falls on it down in the darkness next 
to my knife and I feel of it and think of it. I 
think of what it stands for to me and of what 
it may mean for the world. I feel like a boy 
with a new world in his pocket . . . some- 
times I take it out a minute — the little twisted 
bit of oil-cloth and wire and hold it in my 
hand like a new agate. 

I take a long look at it and try to realize 
it and what it could do in Germany — the 
havoc, the astonishment, the new beliefs it 
could sweep down on Germans out of the sky, 
standing and looking up in their dooryards. 

Of course one might light in a lonely field 
in Germany or under a huckleberry bush or 
on a roof-gutter instead of a sidewalk. But 
America will move news on Germany in 
fleets. She commands all the resources now 
left on the earth to do in the sky as she likes. 
She will empty the whole hollow of the air of 
her enemies. She will not skulk about in 
heaven weakly and economically and make a 
kind of pitter-patter of revolution over Ger- 
many from out of the sky. Millions of bombs 
will be rained down at once. Many of them 



54 The Air -Line to Liberty 

will expect to be wasted. Thousands of them 
will be found like Indian arrowheads by 
farmers, dug up and read a hundred years 
too late, but out of millions a day showered 
on cities and villages from the sky a few hun- 
dred thousand a week would be picked up, 
opened and read, passed secretly along, talked 
over by firesides at night and whispered about 
in the streets. 

The best advertising in this world is free 
advertising — the saying things to people in 
a way they cannot help talking about day or 
night. 

Giving people something to guess. 

Giving people something to look for, to try 
to hunt out in the grass like four-leaved clo- 
vers. 

Making people wonder why. 

Making people wonder when. 

Leading people on, luring them with in- 
credible news to them about themselves. 

Making them wonder each time more and 
more if we are sincere, day after day, time af- 
ter time, until at last our chance comes, we 



The Short-Cut to Victory 55 

act, we do the thing we say, we are the thing 
we say, we mount to a climax of being be- 
lieved. 

Advertising is the science of being believed. 
We can drop news about ourselves and what 
we want to do with Germany and what we 
propose to Germans to do with us, on the side- 
walks, pelt news down like hail on them in 
the great Squares, in the village greens and 
the news even at the risk of life will be read 
— but how can it be believed? What can we 
do to the Germans to prove to them out of the 
sky that we are sincere, to act our sincerity 
out, to prove to them before each other's eyes 
while they look that we are the kind of people 
we say we are, and that we will do what we 
say we will do? 

We tell them in our news-bombs that we are 
not fighting them to kill them but to talk to 
them. 

The most striking and convincing thing to 
do to them would be to stop killing them while 
we are telling them. 

We will mark off a special territory right 
close to them — everywhere above them a mile 



56 The Air-Line to Liberty 

deep up the air — a territory we have the mas- 
tery of and keep the mastery of up over the 
earth, where we can kill and where everybody 
sees we can kill, we will make the sky black 
with airships and darken the sun with the fear 
of killing and then we will not kill. 

Gradually if we do this, I think Germans 
will creep out from their cellars and notice 
Americans. 

We will act like ourselves with the Ger- 
mans, if not down on the ground near The 
Somme at least a mile up in the air. We will 
do things to Germans at least a mile high — 
as we want to. All over Germany we will 
spread across the heavens what Americans are 
like. We will kill men in other airships who 
attack us out of the air, but mere men and 
women and babies, helpless under us down on 
the ground we will talk with. We will do 
the one thing we have wanted to do with them 
all along. We will talk with them. 

First, we will be feared. Then wondered 
at. Then laughed at. 

Then wondered at without laughing. Then 
believed. 



The Short-Cut to Victory 57 

There is no reason why the American peo- 
ple should not speak straight across to the 
German people past the Kaiser, if we speak 
vividly and clearly like this. 

In clear, plain sight before the workmen, 
the women and children looking up from the 
streets and from the fields, we will spell out 
in big letters up over Germany America's 
sincerity toward the German people, Ameri- 
ca's courage and hope for the German people 
upon the sky. 



58 Chapter IX 

THE AIR-LINE TO PEACE 

IT is not necessary for America if she is 
conducting a News-Raid in the air and 
dropping news-bombs over Germany to adopt 
precisely the policy I have suggested. News- 
bombs and bombs of the more usual and more 
expected kind could be dropped together. I 
am not narrowing my idea of advertising what 
America is fighting for in Germany, to drop- 
ping news-bombs alone. We can do the more 
conventional and less bold thing that Germans 
would expect us to do if we find it necessary. 
I am merely — as a man who has been inter- 
ested for many years in the psychology of ad- 
vertising, picking out the most striking and 
most permanent way for the American people 
to touch the imagination of a hundred million 
people in Austria and Germany. 

A hundred million people who are trying 
to touch the imagination of a hundred million 
other people three thousand miles away are 
undertaking a thing so colossal that they 
should see that they are doing it when they 



The Air-Line to Peace 59 

start, in the quickest, cheapest, surest and most 
permanent way. 

Looking at the matter from a strictly ad- 
vertising point of view it is obvious that if 
we are going to drop news-bombs over Ger- 
many out of airplanes the moment they are 
first seen by the people in the streets up over 
a German city, we must make them as sensa- 
tional as possible. 

The first thing that a good advertisement 
provides for is being noticed in the very first 
word. People cannot be expected to go back 
and wonder what it was. A good advertise- 
ment must attack and overwhelm and hold 
voluntarily the attention of people. The loud- 
est, most reverberating thing a fleet of air- 
planes up over a city can think of to do, and 
to do at once, must be done at once. After all 
that has been happening of late a fleet of air- 
planes up over a German city, that did not try 
to kill a single man, woman or baby in it, 
would be — as it seems to me, the most arrest- 
ing kind of advertisement America could use. 

The next principle after arresting attention 
that a good advertisement has to provide for 



60 The Air-Line to Liberty 

is keeping it. Attention that has been arrested 
and dropped is worse than no attention at all. 
One of the earlier things that an advertising 
man of the more powerful sort learns about 
human nature, is that when a man's attention 
has been got by a trick, his attention drops 
with a thud. The attack on a man's atten- 
tion not only has to be held but the boldness 
must be the kind that can be kept up. 

A good advertisement seems to be a fuse of 
ideas, a setting off of a slow mine of culmin- 
ating events inside people's minds, suspense, 
anticipation, personal surprise, personal non- 
surprise, recognition and satisfaction, surprise 
and more satisfaction. . . . Reading a good 
advertisement is like living a little life. If 
an advertisement is good it not only attacks 
and wins a man's attention, it haunts him. 

The airplanes up over Germany will wish 
to bear in mind this principle. 

The next principle our airplanes up over 
Germany are going to bear in mind, is that 
the best advertising is free advertising. All 
paid advertising is for, is to set free advertis- 
ing going. We will spend our money lavishly 



The Air-Line to Peace 61 

— on sweeping the sky free, on getting the full 
mastery of the air and on getting our airplanes 
up over the Germans, but when once we get 
them there the one thing the men in them will 
have to remember, is that what they are there 
for is not to spend our American time and our 
American money on advertising to the Ger- 
mans but on getting the Germans to do our ad- 
vertising for us and on getting them to do it 
for nothing. 

What an airplane is for when it has just 
been up over a city is to make five hundred 
thousand people talk. The one question 
America faces in making a flank movement on 
the German people through the air, is the se- 
lecting of things to do and things to say which 
will set the Germans to doing our advertising 
for us. 

The three-inch news-torpedoes we drop on 
them must have something in them or some- 
thing about the way they are dropped on them 
which will keep five hundred thousand Ger- 
mans sitting up all night talking and whisper- 
ing about us. We must cover a German city 
with a spell of wondering about us. The 



62 The Air-Line to Liberty 

wondering must not be a vague, general, cool, 
public wonder but each man's intimate, des- 
perate, personal wonder, his own personal 
fear and hope. 

To do this, have five hundred thousand 
helpless people, men, women and little chil- 
dren running out into the streets and looking 
up expecting to be killed and then try not kill- 
ing one of them. 

First they will wonder what we are up there 
for. Then they will look at the news-bombs 
and wish they dared to pick up the news- 
bombs to see. People will stand around them 
and watch them at first at a safe distance to see 
if they blow up. Then they will want to open 
one and will wonder if they dare. Some man 
at a distance perhaps will start a fire toward 
one and try burning it. Then he will try read- 
ing it. Then everybody will rush up and try 
reading it. Then everybody will begin find- 
ing their own and go about reading theirs. 

If we do this, the first thing the Germans get 
about us — before they have read a word will 
be news about us that they would never have 
believed. They would not have believed that 



The Air-Line to Peace 63 

the people in America with the power to com- 
mand the sky up over a German city would 
waste a sky like that and use it just to drop 
news from. If we strike at the Germans in this 
way and get them before we have said a word 
to believing things about us they would never 
have believed, perhaps they will be disposed 
when they pick the bombs up, to believe news 
about themselves they never would have be- 
lieved. 

To waste a whole sky up over a German city 
just to drop news out of it, makes people won- 
der not only what the news is, but makes them 
keep wondering what the news is day after 
day — each time, as long as we keep wasting 
the sky for it. "What are Americans wast- 
ing a sky like this to tell us this time?" They 
will think Americans must believe in news a 
good deal. And as our belief in news and in 
what can be done with news is the one specific 
thing above all others we want to get over to 
them, prove to them and advertise to them as 
our substitute and as their substitute for war, 
we will have made our point with the Ger- 
mans at the very beginning and will have the 



64 The Air-Line to Liberty 

underhold on their attention, the long reach 
on their imagination from the start. Germans 
will be going about everywhere picking up 
news-vials of American ideas — Americans' 
ideas about Germans and about what Germans 
can do with Americans. We will have all 
Germany agog in a week. The Kaiser will not 
know what to do with this last silent, vast 
searchlight from America cast on him and on 
his government — this vast, beneficent, wilful, 
self-revelation of the American people to the 
German people fighting them to the death on 
the ground — raining peace down on them 
from out of the sky. 

I was going to say that the peace from 
America raining down from dreadnoughts in 
the sky, — these immense, innumerable, silent 
men of war in heaven, would be the peace that 
passeth all understanding. But there is some- 
thing so remote and beautiful and spiritual- 
sounding about the expression that I fear peo- 
ple will get what I say mixed up with religion 
— and with our supposing we are being supe- 
rior and beautiful, moral characters. 



The Air-Line to Peace 65 

It is not the goodness of the peace that pass- 
eth all understanding — men of war in the air 
letting down doves of peace instead of bombs, 
which concerns me. It is the shrewdness and 
practical common sense of presenting peace to 
people in a way that they do not understand 
but cannot keep from looking at until they do 
— which interests me. It is the power of the 
thing as plain haunting advertising, as get- 
ting honestly and holding conclusively the at- 
tention of a great nation and ending the war. 

The sky, black over their cities with power 
to wipe them off the earth. . . . Then in their 
suspense and fear just dropping on them news 
about them and news about us which will 
make them not want to fight — which will make 
them fight not. To a great kindly, beleaguered 
people imprisoned in their mad-house we will 
make our way with the sensational news — the 
true news that their Kaiser has kept from 
them, which makes their dying for him ten 
thousand a day, which makes their being 
Christs for him ten thousand a day — saviours 
of Hohenzollerns an unspeakable mockery — 
a pitiful delusion. 



66 The Air-Line to Liberty 

We are fighting against Germany a three- 
story war. Underground, undersea. On top 
of the ground, on top of the sea. On top of 
the air. 

I am in favor as I have said before of doub- 
ling and redoubling our fighting on the 
ground and on the western front, but the quick 
victory and the conclusive victory of our ar- 
mies in the field is going to be gained by our 
advertisements through Germany as to what 
the fighting is about. 

With fleets of air ships of news we will at- 
tack the great army of a thousand foolish cities 
at home, of the millions of fooled men slaving 
in the weary fields that alone make the Ger- 
man army at the front possible. 

The ground must be held and the offensive 
on the ground must be held, but it is a com- 
parative waste of money to fight the German 
army in the slow butting, old-fashioned way 
we are doing now — merely at the front. Why 
should we spend all of our seventeen billion 
dollars in attacking the German army on the 
one point where it is braced and strongest? 

The Germans are forty years ahead of us in 



The Air -Line to Peace 67 

shooting and they are forty years behind us 
in news. We will outflank the German army 
with news. 

Instead of biting off slivers of the German 
army, now one inch and now another inch on 
one edge of the army at a time, we will go out 
around it, knock the underpinning out from 
under it, we will undermine it from below, 
crowd it down from above, cut it off at home 
and fight it from behind. We will deal with 
the hidden and deeper sources of supply. We 
will cut off their enthusiasm, paralyze their 
morale, probe through their fighting to the 
faith that makes them fight. We will be ruth- 
less with the German army. The lies about 
us and the lies about themselves, that make 
them fight and that make us fight, shall be 
swept with air-ships as with mighty brooms 
from the sky, out of the path of the world. 

"The only American help to The Allies we 
have seriously to reckon with," says Major 
Hoffre of the German General Staff, "is in 
the air." 

Dropping news out of a sky we command, 
a sky that we use for nothing else — making a 



68 The Air-Line to Liberty 

billboard of heaven for our ideas, and making 
Germans watch the sky day and night for what 
Americans think, will be of itself a demonstra- 
tion that advertising is what we say it is. With 
one stroke out of the air we will have all Ger- 
many doing something it never dreamed it 
would do. If by advertising we can make the 
Germany that fights us because she will not 
listen to us, right about face before her own 
eyes and listen to us and like to listen to us, 
the Germans will see what advertising can do 
by what it has done to them and will believe 
in it as much as we do. Germany will want 
to advertise to us. She will want to establish 
mutual advertising campaigns between the na- 
tions. 

The war will be transposed from the force 
of arms to the force of ideas. 

As this is what the war is about, the object 
of the war will be attained and the war will 
end. 



CHAPTER X 69 

WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO FIRST 

WHAT is there that the American peo- 
ple can do and do now to bring this 
programme to pass? 

See it and want it. 

Twenty rival motor manufacturers the 
other day in Washington went into a room 
and threw down on a table before each other 
all their private inventions. All the secrets 
they had been keeping from each other for a 
lifetime they gave away in a minute for The 
Liberty Motor. People would have said six 
months ago that it would be visionary to try 
to run a war on the idea that ordinary Amer- 
ican men could be counted on suddenly to act 
like business angels. Their attention had been 
got, their imaginations had been touched, they 
were confronted with the life or death of a 
nation, they saw what they wanted, saw it all 
together and went after it. 

The only thing that is necessary to have 
America adopt advertising to-day as an inven- 
tion for cutting across lots and winning this 
war, is to see what it wants and want it. 



70 The Air -Line to Liberty 

There are four sets of advertising cam- 
paigns that the American people through the 
Government's Advertising Department or 
World Department (to be appointed perhaps 
by the President) will proceed to make. We 
will advertise to our Allies so that we can fight 
together better, we will advertise to the Ger- 
mans so that they will not want to fight at all. 
We will advertise to neutrals and to history 
and the judgment bar of the world what Amer- 
ica believes in and what America is going to 
have as a substitute for this German war, and 
we will advertise to ourselves the Great Hole 
of Air up over Germany where. all the world 
can pour in, — what can be done with it, the 
bombs that can be dropped from it, until The 
Great Hole of Air up over Germany we 
have the Kaiser at the bottom of — that we have 
him cornered in, shall be ours. We will see it 
all together and we will want it all together 
and fleets of air planes shall come out of the 
shops, and crowds of airmen shall flock up 
from the people and the money shall pour in 
from the banks and men shall be set to work all 
over the country, editors, authors, business 



What People Can Do First Ji 

men, travelling men, statesmen and attention- 
engineers furnishing the stuffing for the 
bombs. 

In the meantime here is my advertisement 
of advertising addressed to my people — here 
in the Saturday Evening Post, that little bill- 
board of Benjamin Franklin's now grown so 
great where one sees in spirit as one writes, 
ten million men go by a week — I have tacked 
up my hope for my country! 

I am reading it over a minute before let- 
ting it go. One does not want to make a mis- 
take with ten million people. One thinks 
what could be done with a hope for a country 
if the ten million people believed it, if they 
surrounded Congress with it, — if the ten mil- 
lion people knocked on the door of The White 
House and backed up the President with it, 
and crowded around General Squier with 
money letters, Congressmen and votes when 
he goes before Congress presently to ask Amer- 
ica for a billion dollars to buy, own and ad- 
minister Air over Germany as the fortress of 
the liberties of the world. 

I believe that by getting hold of the one hole 



72 The Air-Line to Liberty 

not stopped up into Germany and using it to 
cut past the Kaiser to the German people, we 
are shortening the war two years, shortening 
reconstruction after the war twenty years, sav- 
ing forty billion dollars of American money, 
one million American boys and securing and 
holding for the American people in behalf of 
all free peoples the casting vote — God helping 
us — on the fate of the world. 

I have been hoping that the Saturday Even- 
ing Post would agree with me that the billion 
dollars General Squier has announced he is 
going to ask us for, would be cheap — for what 
we want to get for it. 

Down in Independence Square an hour ago, 
with that little tucked-in Independence Hall, 
so quaint and so unimportant-looking on the 
one side and the great proud Curtis Building 
— where the Post is printed — on the other, I 
stood and thought. I looked up at the great 
proud Curtis Building (it looks rather imper- 
vious sometimes to an Author standing there 
and holding the attention of its ten million 
people in the hollow of its hand!) and as I 
stood before it — heard the dim thunder in it 



What People Can Do First 73 

of millions of magazines — the far tread in the 
presses of the minds of millions of Americans 
marching past I looked back and forth, now 
at the Curtis Building and now at Independ- 
ence Hall, and I could not help thinking how 
the great proud Curtis Building in this des- 
perate moment of my country might possibly 
do a favor to the quaint unimportant-looking 
little simple Independence Hall across the 
Square, how it might help to keep it standing 
in the thoughts and prayers and wills of men 
for what it was there for— if the Curtis Build- 
ing and all the people it carries with it would 
take a stand for advertising a nation as a na- 
tion's national defense, would believe as much 
in advertising as Independence Hall believed 
in it when it took the man who invented ad- 
vertising, — Benjamin Franklin a hundred 
years ago, — sent him over as America's adver- 
tisement to Paris, touched the imagination 
and the chivalry of a great people, gathered 
up France around us and won the war. 

One of the first letters we would like to have 
dropped down on Germany — some of us — 



74 The Air-Line to Liberty 

might have for the gist of it something like 
this: 

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO THE GER- 
MAN PEOPLE in the name of our fathers and your 
fathers and our children and your children, send greetings. 

On the third day of February our President was speak- 
ing to the German Government in these words. . . . 

"I refuse to believe it is the intention of the German 
authorities to do in fact what they have warned they will 
feel at liberty to do. I cannot bring myself to believe 
that they will indeed destroy American ships and take the 
lives of American citizens, that they will pay no regard 
to the ancient friendship between their people and our 
own, or to the solemn obligations which have been ex- 
changed between us. . . ." 

On the third day of August our President, who had 
been saying a little while before "I cannot bring myself 
to believe . . ." was saying this : "The object of America 
in this war against Germany is to deliver the free peoples 
of military establishment, controlled by an irresponsible 
Government, which, having secretly planned to dominate 
the world, proceeded to carry out the plan without regard 
either to the sacred obligations of treaty or the long estab- 
lished practices and long cherished principles of interna- 
tional action and honor; which chose its own time for the 
war, delivered its blow fiercely and suddenly, stopped at 
no barrier, either of law or mercy, swept a whole conti- 
nent within the tide of blood — not the blood of soldiers 
only, but the blood of innocent women and children also 



What People Can Do First 75 

and of the helpless poor ; and now stands, balked but not 
defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of the world." 

The difference between these two ways of speaking to 
the German Government, is what this letter from the 
American people to the German people is about. 

We want to tell the German people directly and for 
ourselves what has happened. All through this war up to 
the last possible minute the American people have kept up 
the fight in their minds to believe in Germans. For 
months and for years — long after to all the rest of the 
world, we were being criminally patient, we kept on in 
America through our President fighting to trust you. Inch 
by inch and point by point you have driven us back from 
our faith in you. We risked the fate of the world, 
wagered the souls of our people, put up the lives of our 
children, up to the last possible minute, to believe in Ger- 
many. Again and still again — with half the world laugh- 
ing in our faces, have our people cried out across the sea 
to your people and there has been no answer from your 
people to our people . . . the same rattling of the sa- 
ber . . . the same weary, sad silence. . . . 

And even now when we are fighting you in every way 
we know — under the sea, on the sea, on the ground and 
up in the air — we are fighting you to trust you. We are 
chopping our way past you, to where we can hew out of 
you a way to believe you. 

To-day at last with these air planes we are getting our 
first word through to you and can say to you directly for 
ourselves what we are fighting the German people for. 

We are hunting far and wide and up and down Ger- 
many for Germans we know we can trust and until our 



76 The Air-Line to Liberty 

last dollar is gone, and until our last man is dead shall 
we keep on fighting on through Germany not for terri- 
tory, not for indemnity but for Germans we can trust. 
As long as the German people put forward in dealing with 
us men it is only safe to use force with, force will have to 
be kept up. You are going to keep on shooting and killing 
off your customers in America and we are going to keep 
on shooting and killing off people we would rather trade 
with in Germany, until you put forward to deal with us 
men something besides shooting can be done with — men 
whose promises Americans can believe. 

If you wish to know who these men could probably be 
picked out from in Germany, the men could be picked out 
— we should think — by answering two or three simple 
questions. 

Who are the men you know of in Germany who shut 
down their windows or turned away their heads when 
they heard the bells ringing out in Germany three years 
ago to celebrate the murder of twelve hundred innocent 
men, women, babies and neutrals on a passenger liner? 
(We suspect you were kept from knowing it was a pas- 
senger liner) but men to represent you with America 
might be picked out from these. 

Who are the men who during this war have shown the 
most courage in behalf of the people with the Govern- 
ment? 

We do not agree very many of us in America with 
Liebknecht but if a man who goes to jail for what he be- 
lieves should be put forward to make promises for Ger- 
many to America we would believe him. He would be 
priceless to you and priceless to us at once. 



What People Can Do First 77 

Who are the men in Germany who if their advice had 
been asked about getting to Paris by striking on the way 
a small helpless neutral nation in the back, would have 
told the Government that it would not work and that it 
would merely pull on Germany the trigger of the world? 
Men for America to trust could be picked out from these. 
We are fighting Germany to plow our way through to 
men like these. We are hacking our way past the Ger- 
many we see and that has been fronted up against us so 
that we have to see, to the Germany we know, to the Ger- 
many we believe in, the Germany we hope for and the 
Germany that hopes for us. We will not feel superior to 
you and give you up ! 

"This is a people's war" as our President has said — "a 
war for freedom and justice and self government among 
all the nations of the world, a war to make the world 
safe for the peoples who live upon it and have made it 
their own, the German people themselves included. . . . 

"We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no con- 
quest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves 
and no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall 
freely make. . . . We fight for the things we have always 
carried nearest to our hearts, for the right of those who 
submit to authority to have a voice in their own Govern- 
ment, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a 
universal dominion of right by such concert of free peo- 
ples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make 
the world itself free. 

"To such a task we dedicate our lives and our fortunes 
— everything that we are and everything that we have, 
with the pride of those who know that the day has come 



78 The Air-Line to Liberty 

when America is privileged to spend her blood and her 
might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness, 
and the peace which she has treasured. 
God helping her she can do no other!" 



Chapter XI 79 

END OF ADVERTISEMENT ONE 

1HAVE presented in these chapters for the 
possible adoption of my country three in- 
ventions. 

First: An invention of the physical means 
of cutting past the Kaiser and of putting our 
advertisements of what America is fighting 
for where the Germans can see them and read 
them. 

Second : The invention of a proposition for 
America to make in the advertisements which 
will make the Germans read them eagerly, 
namely: a substitute for war Germans would 
feel safe with and in which Germans would 
be glad to join with Americans and act with 
Americans — if Americans could be believed 
in by Germans. 

Third: An invention for being believed in 
by Germans. 

The invention of the physical means of get- 
ting the attention of Germans has already been 
attended to in the air planes of the Air Craft 
Board, and in the news-torpedo in my pocket 



80 The Air-Line to Liberty 

which has been invented and offered to the 
Government by Roger Babson. 

The other two inventions, the invention of 
advertising as a substitute for war and the in- 
vention for being believed in by Germans, 
are not yet attended to and cannot be attended 
to until they are advertised to the people and 
the people want them. 

I hope no reader is going to think, now that 
we have got to the end of this first introduction 
or advertisement of my idea, that I am suppos- 
ing I have got him to believe it. 

What I have written this first advertisement 
for is to get him to want to believe it. I do 
not know how it works with others but it 
always antagonizes me a little when I catch 
myself with an idea, wanting to believe it. 
I at once begin looking around just because 
I want it, for things it will have to buck up 
against. I hope my reader is looking around 
now. The more things an idea has to buck up 
against the more it thinks and the better it 
gets. Apparently what makes an idea drive 
through in the end is the way it likes its diffi- 
culties and meets details. 



End of Advertisement One 81 

It is only fair to me and to the reader and 
to my idea, to say that if any man wishes to 
see this idea bucking up against details so that 
he can believe it, back it up and get the people 
to back it up and get the Government to carry 
it through, he can be sure that he will not be 
interfered with (except by the author), in 
reading the chapters ahead. 



II 

AMERICA AND GERMANY 

Chapter I 

CROSS-CIRCUITED NEWSPAPERS 

EVERY morning (it is four years now) I 
get up and read editorials in the New 
York Times that I have no use for. I admire 
and believe the editorials but I have no use 
for them and they have no use for me. At least 
one out of every five editorials I read in the 
New York Times, since the war began, neither 
I nor any other American can do a thing with. 

I ask myself at the end of it, "What is the 
one possible thing I can do with this editor- 
ial?" 

I sit still and read it over again and wish 
some German would read it. 

Then I wonder why the New York Times 
83 



84 The Air-Line to Liberty 

is not doing anything about getting some Ger- 
man to read it. 

But the New York Times could not get it- 
self quoted in Germany alone. Even if all 
of the hundreds of thousands of subscribers 
who back Mr. Miller's editorials up, were to 
insist each morning vociferously that the edi- 
torial they had just read at breakfast must in- 
stantly be read by the Kaiser, that it must be 
instantly translated, marconigramed, air- 
planed and delivered to twenty German cities 
before night, nothing could be done about it. 

Only America's World Department could 
do it. With a bird's-eye view of all the edi- 
torials in America and command of the air 
over Germany and of what was needed in 
Germany that morning, that no single news- 
paper could hope to have, it could act for all 
the papers and for all the country to all of 
Germany at once. 

• • • • * 

Now for four years I have watched the 
Springfield Republican getting up bright and 
early every morning down on the other side 
of Mount Tom and telling a hundred thou- 



Cross-Circuited Newspapers 85 

sand men in Springfield what they believe al- 
ready. I am always coming on an especially 
fine stirring wise editorial on Germany in the 
Republican. I think what it would mean if 
instead of having that editorial wasted on a 
hundred thousand men in Springfield who be- 
lieve it already, a hundred Germans in Ger- 
many could read it. 

Why do not the New York Times and the 
Springfield Republican and a few thousand 
other papers in this country that are trying 
now in a distant wistful way to supply the 
world with ideas for this war that only Ger- 
mans can use, combine to-morrow morning 
and begin to organize to-morrow morning a 
huge national mutual campaign to put their 
ideas for Germans where the Germans can get 
at them and use them — a campaign for having 
the New York Times and Springfield Repub- 
lican editorials read — in spite of the Kaiser 
in Germany? 

I believe that it can be done and that it is 
going to be done, the moment our American 
newspapers are less modest about themselves, 
and less satisfied with just whispering about 



86 The Air-Line to Liberty 

Germany to their own subscribers. They will 
start up — of their own accord — a World De- 
partment at Washington. 

Far be it from me not to admit that getting 
an idea over to a hundred Germans who need 
it and can do something with it and can start 
a new Germany with it, costs more than get- 
ting the same idea over to a hundred thousand 
Americans in Springfield, Massachusetts. 

But what are ideas for? 

They are for the people who do not have 
them. 

• • • • • 

I do not know just how many million dol- 
lars a week are now being spent in America 
on laying before me and other Americans 
news, facts and ideas we have already and 
which only Germans need, but I do know that 
if half of the money that is now being spent 
by our great papers in giving us in America 
ideas we have already, were being spent by 
the papers or by the Government on putting 
their ideas for one week where Germans could 
have them and use them, victory for The Al- 
lies would loom up in a month. 



Cross-Circuited Newspapers 87 

If we are sincere in saying what we are 
always saying in the New York Times and 
Springfield Republican that the world must 
be ruled by ideas and not by guns; if we pro- 
pose to take ideas seriously it will not be long 
before we will proceed to make national ar- 
rangements to use military strategy with ideas, 
to make drives with ideas on the people we 
want to hit — on the people the ideas will have 
to hit if they do anything. It will not be long 
before the New York Times and the Spring- 
field Republican, all the other papers and all 
their readers will be asking The United States 
Government to make provision for deliver- 
ing papers in Germany. 

It will be merely a matter of journalism — 
of plain bare military strategy in ideas for 
the New York Times and Republican to de- 
mand that provision be made by The Com- 
mander in Chief of the American forces to 
have their kind of explosives brought up to 
the front and aimed at the enemy at once. 

Why keep on aiming them vaguely and 
pleasantly at Americans? If Pershing were 
to bring over his army as a matter of military 



88 The Air-Line to Liberty 

strategy next week and concentrate on New 
York, Chicago and San Francisco — and blow 
up New York, Chicago and San Francisco, 
the New York Times, the Chicago Daily 
News and the San Francisco Bulletin would 
tell Pershing he was absurd. 

But Pershing would be doing with his kind 
of ammunition precisely what they are doing 
with theirs. 

We have twenty thousand editors, vast regi- 
ments of editors in America all aiming their 
idea-howitzers, their news-shrapnel at cities 
where the ground is covered with news al- 
ready. 

News and editorials that should be snowed 
down on Germany are snowed down on us. 
All day every day here in America we go 
about — we Americans — knee-deep in news for 
Germans. 

I admit that it will cost money to do what 
I have in mind and get our news-ammunition 
over into Germany. 

I am not denying it is cheaper in handling 
our news-ammunition for Germany, to dump 



Cross-Circuited Newspapers 89 

it in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Somers, 
Connecticut. 

I admit that instead of going to all the trou- 
ble to get our news-ammunition over to where 
it counts, it would be cheaper to have our am- 
munition factories — our Du Pont factories — 
just go about the country in a kind of reverie 
of explosions the way our newspapers do and 
blow each other up. But while it would cost 
more to get our ideas into Germans, is not 
that after all the one thing we are shooting 
them for so expensively — because we want 
to get them in? 

And all the time every day while we are 
shooting harder and making arrangements on 
a vast scale as I devoutly hope, to shoot still 
harder, there is at hand a definite workable 
way in which the American government and 
newspapers between them can cover Germany 
with American ideas. 

I keep thinking every day of this definite 
workable way to cover Germany with Amer- 
ican ideas. 

But American ideas will have to act. 

It is very hard to stand by and look around 



90 The Air-Line to Liberty 

up here on Mount Tom and watch the huge 
beautiful national reverie of the American 
Press going round and round on Itself, with- 
out interrupting it. 

Everybody else is watching it too. 

Every morning — one morning after the 
other in a kind anxious devoted way — the way 
people used to begin the morning with family 
prayers, The Press of America gets up, looks 
toward Germany and has its Daily Morning 
Yearn toward Germany. 

In a wide, gentle, half-awake dream, it gets 
up and plants every morning German Revo- 
lutions in America. 

Why not plant them in Germany? 

All the American people have to do to have 
the New York Times and the Springfield 
Republican delivered in Germany is to get 
the Times and the Republican and other 
papers as interested in it as I am. The mo- 
ment that the Times and the Republican 
can be got to be less modest about their edi- 
torials and about the power of ideas, in this 
war, the ideas will begin ending it. 

But if the New York Times and the Repub- 



Cross-Circuited Newspapers 91 

lican and the other papers are modest about 
their ideas, the people do not need to be. The 
people's government does not need to be. The 
American papers have the ideas. Let the 
American people see that they are delivered. 

Our armies in the field are pointing the Ger- 
mans to our ideas and when they point them 
to them, the ideas must be there. 

The moment our people see that the quick- 
est short-cut to the victory of our armies in 
the field turns on New York papers being 
picked up every day in Germany they will see 
that suitable arrangements are made through 
the Government to attend to it. 

We are shooting the Germans and the Ger- 
mans are shooting us at incredible expense 
every day because the Germans have a theory 
that they do not want our ideas. 

The first sensible thing to do is to see (while 
we keep on shooting of course) that arrange- 
ments are made to have the Germans, in spite 
of the Kaiser, know what the ideas are. We 
will soon have the New York papers delivered 
regularly to the German people until they 
want to stop shooting, until they wonder why 



92 The Air-Line to Liberty 

they are shooting and letting themselves be 
shot. 

The Germans would rather be shot by the 
Kaiser than by us — when they get their papers. 

A while ago I read an editorial on The 
Moral Bankruptcy of Germany, copied in the 
New York Times from the New York Even- 
ing Post. I was grateful to the New York 
Times for appreciating the editorial and copy- 
ing it and seeing that I read it. 

But when I read it I could not help feeling 
how pathetic it was — after all — an editorial 
like that for sixty-six million Germans, waver- 
ing around and petering out on me! 

One German reading it would have been 
worth a hundred thousand Lees. 

In a general way I believe — as well as the 
New York Times and Springfield Republican 
— that ideas are the forces that rule the world. 

But I want to see them ruling the world 
now. 

I want to see something done now to front 
up a German with an idea. I want to make 



Cross-Circuited Newspapers 93 

him look into the mouth of the cannon of the 
idea. 

If the things that have been said to Ameri- 
cans ten thousand times a day during this war, 
had been said to Germans, the war would have 
been over two years ago. 



94 Chapter II 

WINNING AWAY GERMANY'S INITIATIVE 

AL O O S E-JOINTED strung-together 
Force like America and her Allies, can 
only hope to deal strategically with a massed 
force like the German people, by studying and 
picking out the weak points in the German 
psychology. 

German efficiency, like any other efficiency, 
has the defects of its qualities. 

What can be said to be the chief trait of the 
German psychology on its weaker side? 

All that the Germans can ever do with a 
thing is to drive it through further or screw 
it up tighter or multiply it. 

They almost never think of anything of 
their own to say, but they invent ways of cheap 
copying and of having more copies than any 
people on earth. Their minds operate essen- 
tially like printing presses. 

And the Germans almost never think of any- 
thing to do. They just do something some 
more. 

The way for Americans to grapple with 
Germany and to get ahead of Germany quick, 



Winning Away Germany* s Initiative 95 

is for us to do something original — something 
which the Germans with their machine-like, 
standardized and ponderous habits of mind 
would not have thought of and will not be 
ready for. 

In all the ways that a burglar who has been 
planning to break in for forty years, can get 
ready, Germany is ready for us three to one. 

The Germans are ready to face us three to 
one by every route and at every point except 
Sky and News. 

It is Germany's initiative, her forty years' 
start, that has made her terrible in this war. 

Initiative is Germany's secret. 

The quick way to defeat Germany is to find 
the quick way to take away her forty-year ini- 
tiative. 

The way to take away her forty-year in- 
itiative is to pick out something to do at once 
in which forty years does not count. The 
world has a right to look to America, coming 
into the war fresh and strong as she does, to 
take Germany's initiative away. 

Very little has been done by America in 
this war so far which would seem to indicate 



96 The Air-Line to Liberty 

that America is going to take Germany's in- 
itiative away. We have just been doing things 
some more. The right of the world to look to 
us for something original, something that will 
stand a chance of taking the Germans by sur- 
prise and of moving the initiative over to the 
Allies, has not been emphasized in America. 
I have no question of either the resources 
or the inventiveness of my country, and I be- 
lieve that the next thing we are going to plan 
for in America — plan for almost as if it were 
all the war were about, — is for taking Ger- 
many's initiative away. 

All that America needs to do to proceed at 
once to make her main drive at taking Ger- 
many's initiative away, is to stop long enough 
to think what initiative in a war is, what 
America might do with initiative if she had it, 
and what Germany has done with it the last 
four years. 

Every way of fighting in this war so far — 
except the tank, has been selected by Ger- 
mans. All we have done on our side is to catch 
up to them, slowly meet them and hold our 



Winning Away Germany's Initiative 97 

own with them — in ways of fighting the Ger- 
mans have picked out. 

First, the Germans picked out physical 
force as a means of deciding the fate of the 
world, and worked on it forty years in secret. 

We were not ready for that. 

Then they picked out the idea of putting 
treachery and physical force together and of 
striking an innocent bystander like Belgium 
in the back. 

We were not ready for that, but slowly we 
have held our own. 

Then they picked out the Zeppelin and 
abolished the distinction between combatants 
and non-combatants and killed spectators and 
women. 

We were not ready for that. Slowly we 
caught up to Zeppelins. 

Then they picked out the submarine and 
attacked all nations alike, invented the idea 
of sinking the ships of all nations that did not 
take sides with them. 

Gradually we caught up and held our own 
against the German way of sinking ships. 

Then she started poisonous gases, Bern- 



98 The Air-Line to Liberty 

storff plottings in America, secret propaganda 
among neutrals, and advertising everywhere, 
typhus-germs in Rumania, Zimmermann in 
Mexico, slavery and deportation, and using 
women prisoners as barriers for soldiers to 
fight behind. 

From the beginning of the war Germany 
has proposed one thing after another to the 
rest of the world — that we would have to do 
to fight her. From the first minute until al- 
most the other day America and The Allies in 
this war have done nothing but talking back 
and catching up. 

The conscription of men, the conscription 
of wealth, the government control and dicta- 
torship in industry, in food and prices and 
transportation, and in the labor of women — 
the list can be filled out by anybody indefi- 
nitely. 

The one single thing in the war in which 
The Allies have taken the initiative is the 
tank. The one single thing in which The Al- 
lies, in following their time-worn policy of 
catching up, have gone farther and gone on 






Winning Away Germany's Initiative 99 

ahead of Germany, is in the flying machine 
and in the command of the air. 

All of the physical inventions Germany has 
used against us, are inventions which have 
been invented by The Allies, and all that Ger- 
many has invented with them has been a 
meaner, more thorough, frightful way of us- 
ing them — a kind of moral boundlessness. Her 
sole invention has been her meanness, her de- 
liberate religious faith in the meanness. In 
everything but the air-plane her meanness — 
the massiveness of her meanness has kept the 
initiative in her hands. 

This seems to point to the air-plane made 
on a massive scale and applied to the sky and 
to news on a massive scale, as America's quick- 
est and surest way of taking the initiative out 
of the hands of Germans. 

We cannot get into Germany on the sea or 
on the ground for a long time, but we will take 
possession of the free and empty air up over 
Germany, of the air she breathes — of her stars 
and sunshine . . . we will make the sky our 
fortress. 

The sky which Wilbur Wright has made 



ioo The Air-Line to Liberty 

swing like a great open door over her as wide 
as from France to Russia shall be ours. 

There are two things we will arrange for 
at once. We will arrange for getting into 
Germany by Germany's weakest route. And 
then we will arrange for using when we get 
there, the explosive Germany is least used to. 

This means Sky and News. 

The sky in Germany is their weakest front. 
News in Germany, especially news from the 
outside, is an explosive Germans have almost 
never heard of and against which (as things 
go in Germany) neither the German govern- 
ment nor the German people would have the 
slightest idea what to do. 

Why does the London Times cost in Ger- 
many since the war began from $1.00 up to 
$50.00 a copy? 

Because it is the explosive the German gov- 
ernment is afraid of most. 

The moment we get the news into the coun- 
try which the Government is running an enor- 
mous blockade to keep out, and the moment the 
German people begin reading it and begin 
hearing at last, blowing up all around them, 



Winning Away Germany's Initiative ioi 

facts about the German people and facts about 
the American people they have never had the 
remotest idea could be true, the Germans will 
be stunned and staggered into our hands. 

Truths that the rest of the world have been 
taking in painfully and been getting used to 
for years, the Germans will have to get used 
to in a week. News that America, England 
and France had months to rehearse and years 
to learn how to handle, — four years' worth of 
news all at once, will undermine the vision and 
honeycomb the wills of the German people. 
The discovery by the German people of the 
way the German Kaiser has allowed the truth 
to be kept from them, has kept whole worlds- 
ful of it dammed up in foreign countries 
where Germans could not get a trickle, where 
the enemies of the German people alone could 
have the use of it, reap the benefit of it, alone 
could get ready for it, get the start in living 
with it — the discovery of this in one blow all 
over Germany will strip the Kaiser naked be- 
fore his people, shame him, wither him, un- 
man him before the world. 

Attacked by the Sky-and-News Route, Ger- 



102 The Air -Line to Liberty 

many is going to be at a disadvantage, — a 
heaped up, tragic, culminating, colossal dis- 
advantage no nation in this modern open- 
doored, free-printed world has ever dreamed 
of, ever been hunted into or cornered before. 

There is one other reason why the plan of 
taking away the initiative of Germany by a 
news-raid in the air is a comparatively prac- 
ticable one for America. 

A frank, open democracy like America, 
fighting a vast Secret Society like Germany, 
cannot hope to keep secret from the Germans 
long what her main plan of attack will be. 
She will have to get ready for the attack out 
loud, and by interesting all her people in it, 
her billions of dollars, her hundreds of thou- 
sands of flying machines, her flocks of flying 
men, and the plan in which America's getting 
ready out loud will make the least difference, 
will be the best one to adopt. 

If we pick out the sky for our route, and 
pick out news for our explosives we will have 
picked out a way of fighting the Germans in 
which the Germans, no matter how much they 



Winning Away Germany's Initiative 103 

know about what we are going to do, cannot 
get ready to meet us. Germans do not tem- 
peramentally understand sky-and-air fighting 
nor do they temperamentally understand fight- 
ing foreign news in Germany, and even if they 
did, they cannot get the men now and the ma- 
terial now, nor the facts and news now, as the 
world stands to-day, one-tenth as well as 
America and her Allies. 

America will have taken the initiative at 
last which will grip the quickest, which will 
hold the longest, which will hold after the war 
is over, the one initiative in which a tight- 
mouthed and secret nation, a plotting, slink- 
ing, submarine, spy nation like Germany can 
never hope to catch up. 

We will open the clouds wide over Ger- 
many, rain down on all Germany the wrath, 
the undreamed of new religion, the new sing- 
ing of the beliefs of all nations. It shall be as 
music, as a great storm to Germany, the thun- 
der of the hopes of the world rolling above 
her head. We will run the gamut of a peo- 
ple. We will play on Germany, on the cities 
and fields of Germany as on great chords. 



104 The Air-Line to Liberty 

We will sweep the keyboard of a nation, of 
the hopes and fears of a people with huge, 
long, peaceful strokes of news across the sky. 

Then the next day we will do it again. 

In the papers of New York and Chicago, 
London, Paris and Rome, each morning at the 
top of the first page there will be published 
by wireless, bulletins and headlines like this: 

HERE IS TO-DAY'S NEWS-BOMB FROM 
FIVE HUNDRED GERMAN CITIES TO- 
DAY 

or this 

THIS MORNING'S WORD FROM FRANCE 

Hundreds of German soldiers, General Pershing cables, 
are being caught and shot for reading the news-bombs 
being dropped in the German trenches this week. But the 
news drives through. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred 
can be watched and can be kept from reading a news- 
bomb, but the one out of the hundred who does read it 
cannot be watched and kept from whispering. General 
Pershing reports that the advertisement of the President, 
that all German soldiers who would come over to our side 
and take a stand with us for liberty in Germany and the 
world against the Kaiser would be ranked as comrades 
instead of prisoners, is taking effect. In the confusion of 
the drive last Thursday fifteen hundred Germans, whole 



Winning Away Germany's Initiative 105 

companies at a time, some with their officers, crossed the 
lines. 

Or this 

The circulation of our American Aerial News or Air 
Gazette, being delivered in German cities by our Sky- 
News-Boys this week is estimated at million 

copies. 

If the German press does not suit us in 
Germany we will have one of our own. By 
delivering the real news — the secret news out 
of sky, we will drive the Kaiser's newspapers 
out of business. 

If America will have the imagination, the 
masterfulness, courage and self-sacrifice to 
amass and mobilize a vast fleet of airships, take 
absolute control of the air over the world, the 
future of the world is in her hands. 

The future of the world which to-day Amer- 
ica holds in the hollow of her hand is The 
Hollow of the Sky. The sky is the World's 
Hand now. The wireless and the airship have 
become the weapons of the human spirit. The 
Kaiser's funny little old-fashioned hope for 



106 The Air-Line to Liberty 

his funny little freedom of the seas or for a 
mere humdrum taking of Paris with soldiers 
down on the ground, like a mere Napoleon 
left over from a hundred years ago, has 
gone by. | || 

We will hold our own on the ground, of 
course, and a little more so as to keep him 
from doing what he is trying to do, but the 
constructive, converging, conquering drive, 
the massive initiative for America and her 
Allies shall be in the air. 



Chapter III 107 

WINNING THE WAR AND GERMANY TOGETHER 

AN advertisement for Germany just at this 
time, which is constructed without a 
clamp on it — an advertisement which any min- 
ute might slip back, will not work. Whatever 
we may say or do now to get Germany to 
listen — whatever advertisement we put for- 
ward now to make Germany believe us, must 
be constructed with a ratchet, so that day by 
day we can roll it up tighter and make them 
believe us more. The moment that in the 
informal, impromptu action of events there 
comes a little slack, we must be sure we have 
chosen an advertisement in Germany that will 
hold with a mighty grip. 

The best ratchet on our advertising we can 
have in Germany, is to do what we say we will 
do while we are saying it — even before we say 
it. To have the under-grip with the Germans 
we must get our word to hold. The only pos- 
sible under-grip we can have with the Ger- 
mans is to select something to do and some- 
thing to say that will make them trust us. 

We must dare to get them to trust us. Noth- 



108 The Air-Line to Liberty 

ing would make more of a sensation in Ger- 
many now and get more attention in Germany 
now than somebody from outside going about 
all over Germany being trusted. A great peo- 
ple from the outside just now, even if they 
have to be crowded off up into the sky to do 
it, that would go about Germany doing things 
and saying things that would make Germans 
want to trust them — will soon be in a posi- 
tion to take the lead and keep the lead in end- 
ing the war and in arranging the world when 
it is ended. 

I am a little jealous to have this nation, my 
own nation — if it is compatible with the inter- 
ests of the world — and to this end I hope that 
America in making its great offensive on Ger- 
many, its air-news-raid on Germany, will do 
it on such a scale and in such a spirit that it 
will be in a position to advertise its substitute 
for war in Germany — by using the most arrest- 
ing, disarming, jiu-jitsu, baffling way of all — 
to the Germans — advertising without shooting. 
If we say to them in our advertisement that 
we are fighting them to trust them and to get 
them to trust us, we must do something while 



Winning the War and Germany 109 

we say it that will make our idea of trusting 
visible to them, that will dramatize trusting 
to them. To say that we are introducing ad- 
vertising as a substitute for shooting and then 
shoot them from the very airships in which 
we say it, will not dramatize trusting, to Ger- 
mans. The accepted way to do with a man 
who is crazy and who is going about striking 
out at people, is to get hold of him by main 
force, hold him down, get his arms under him 
and his legs under him, fold him up and talk 
to him. The way to win a man's respect and 
get his permanent attention, is to use one's 
power over him to hold him and not to injure 
him, any more than is necessary to hold him. 

This is apparently what the sky is for up 
over Germany in this war — to America. 

The sky, the air-plane, and the advertise- 
ment afford America not only her most bold 
and original offensive against the Germans 
but her most natural and expressive one. In- 
stead of fighting the Germans in their way, 
the way they have given us orders to fight 
them, instead of doing what they have forced 
us to do, as we do on the ground, up in the 



no The Air-Line to Liberty 

air we will fight in a way we have chosen 
ourselves, a way that quite accurately and hon- 
estly expresses us. Poisonous gases and sub- 
marines and howitzers may be able to express 
just now German ideas and Germans, if they 
insist on making us believe it, but we do not 
feel that poisonous gases, submarines and how- 
itzers quite express our ideas — as yet — or that 
they can quite do justice to us. 

Any place where we can keep from using 
them and can use something that expresses us 
better, we will. 

There is another reason why America in 
putting over her three great advertisements 
to the Germans — "We can whip you with our 
guns," "We can whip you with our souls," 
and our substitute for war — will find it good 
advertising to avoid reprisals. If we tell the 
Germans that we are fighting for the right of 
peoples to govern themselves, the only sure 
way to show them just how much we mean by 
it, is to govern ourselves while we are doing 
it. If democracy cannot exercise a higher self- 
control than an autocracy can, and cannot ex- 



Winning the War and Germany Hi 

ercise it in the very teeth of autocracy, what 
good is it going to do us to advertise through- 
out Germany to the Germans that we can whip 
them with our souls? 

The cheapest, quickest way to advertise self- 
government in Germany is going to be to show 
them some — to give them, across the whole 
sky up over their country where they can see 
it any time they look — the sight of a great 
people controlling themselves. 

There is another reason why we in America 
— in advertising to the Germans that we can 
whip their souls with our souls, must do it 
while we are talking about it. 

The wording of the advertisement "We can 
whip you with our souls," may express in a 
rough way the core of the idea this war with 
Germany is for, but perhaps it is unnecessary 
to say that this particular advertisement can- 
not be called practicable from the point of 
view of good advertising psychology unless it 
is delivered over to the Germans with a shrewd 
knowledge and a relentless criticism of our- 
selves. 

The only way to be practical in putting over 



112 The Air-Line to Liberty 

a necessary colossal insolent advertisement like 
this on a people like the German people is to 
be religious with it. In making the announce- 
ment to the Germans that our souls are going 
to whip their souls, the first thing we will have 
to arrange for is to have something about our 
souls which while we do it will make the Ger- 
mans half-believe it. 

This war is the sacrament of the free peo- 
ples. With hunger and sacrifice and prayer 
and death we bow ourselves before our God 
and the Germans' God. With confessions 
on our lips we rush into battle. By conquer- 
ing ourselves we will conquer God. Then we 
will conquer Germans. The sins in Germans 
which we have faced and had a death-gaze at 
in ourselves, and had a death-honesty with in 
ourselves, and which in the last grim battle 
we have conquered for the time in ourselves, 
only these sins will we know how to aim at in 
Germans and know how to conquer in Ger- 
mans. In our own souls we will all have 
gone over the whole ground, rehearsed our 
battle with the Germans. With humbleness 
for our own sins and security and victory and 



Winning the War and Germany 113 

forgiveness for theirs, we go forth to hew out 
of Germans and out of ourselves a new world. 
The spirit of the men of America shall chal- 
lenge the spirit of the men of Germany. If we 
are humble and honest with ourselves, if we 
do what we say we do, ourselves, I see that our 
enemies shall melt before us as stubble. Our 
spirit shall be mightier in the earth than their 
spirit, and our world shall overcome their 
world, and I see or seem to see even now as I 
write the day not far off, when the Germans' 
souls shall salute our souls, when the Germans' 
souls shall gather around our souls and help us 
overcome it. 



ii4 Chapter IV 

WINNING THE WORLD AND GERMANY 
TOGETHER 

THERE is one more reason I would like to 
give for America's commanding the sky 
over Germany without reprisals, and for our 
conducting ourselves in the sky in a way that 
expresses the vision, the will and the hope of 
a great people. 

Every advertisement America undertakes in 
Germany will be intended to advertise or 
drive its way through to the attainment of two 
objects. 

Our first object will be to advertise Amer- 
ica in Germany in such a way as to get the 
Germans to believe in us and to trust what we 
promise and what we propose to do. 

Our second object will be to get the world 
and a hundred other nations, by the way we 
deal with Germany, to believe in us and trust 
what we promise and what we propose to do. 

As the oldest democracy, America has made 
herself at least a candidate for taking the lead- 
ing part in reconstructing the world after the 
war. 



Winning the World and Germany 115 

Our friends in the hundred other nations 
with whom we shall have to cooperate after 
the war is over, to run a world, are going to 
know us best and trust us quickest by seeing 
how we handle our most difficult problem. 

Our friends will feel safe with us, or not 
safe with us, after watching us with our ene- 
mies. 

The supreme and decisive test of America 
in this war is going to turn on the things it 
sees to do and the things it sees it can afford 
to do, in dealing with her enemies. 

And America's place in the world is going 
to be earned, revealed and accorded to her by 
all nations, by the way America gets the atten- 
tion and conquers the trust of the German 
people. 

The nations will watch us with Germany 
and study our spirit and our power in dealing 
with Germany. "So will America do with all 
of us" they will say. 



n6 Chapter V 

NO HALFNESS, NO HEMMING AND HAWING, 
NO TWIDDLING WITH PEACE 

^ I^HE reader will remember perhaps that I 
■*- have assumed all along since the first 
chapter that the only idea we can hope to get 
the attention of Germans with adequately and 
at first, is with the idea that we can whip them 
and that we have whipped them with our 
guns. Our second advertisement — the idea 
that we can whip them with our souls, while 
it comes second in order of time comes first 
in order of importance because whipping the 
Germans with our souls is our only way of be- 
ing thorough in this war, of getting out of the 
war what we want out of it, and fighting Ger- 
mans to a finish. 

The sooner we get ready to do it and the 
sooner we gather our souls together and see 
just how our souls are going to do it, and go- 
ing to be fit to do it, the sooner the war is 
over. After all, all there is to the war, is mak- 
ing Germans want to listen. Guns are merely 
a detail in our main drive of making Germans 
want to listen. They are our opening volley 






No Halfness, No Hemming 117 

— our stupid necessary roar before we speak. 

If America gathers all its fighting spirit 
from now on, into a tremendous overwhelming 
and battering campaign of making the Ger- 
mans want to listen — if America will govern 
everything it selects to say to Germany and 
to do to Germany from guns up, to the one 
great main drive of making Germans wonder 
what we think and making Germans ask us 
what we want to do, America will be the na- 
tion that will first discover and first lead the 
way along the one possible short-cut to the 
peace of the world. 

I would like to go over with the reader a 
few of the proposed substitutes for this policy 
— the policy of advertising while fighting — 
which will not work. 

The first substitute was hinted at by Lloyd 
George some time ago when he said that the 
world must make Germany free or powerless. 

England and France and America can bat- 
ter away on Germany a thousand years to 
make her free. She can only be made free by 
making herself free, and the only possible way 
to make Germany make herself free, is for the 



n8 The Air-Line to Liberty 

people of the rest of the world who have some 
freedom, to take some — some real, honest, hu- 
man, democratic freedom — move some of it 
over into Germany where Germans cannot 
help seeing it, and advertise it to Germans un- 
til they want it. 

When Lloyd George puts forward as a sub- 
stitute for advertising freedom in Germany, 
making Germany powerless, he puts forward 
a substitute which will not work. 

It is as necessary to us as it is to Germany 
that the wound that Germany has made in the 
world shall be cured. 

If Germany could be removed, like an ap- 
pendix, it would be different. 

But Germany is not an appendix. Germany 
(if I may use a homely figure) is at least 
two feet of the twenty-four feet of the Ali- 
mentary Canal of the world. She is nothing 
to herself without the other twenty-two feet 
and we are not good for much — for a very 
long time — without her. 

If a stupid and discouraged thing like mak- 
ing Germany powerless, is all that America 



No Halfness, No Hemming 119 

and The Allies can do with her after this war, 
we are whipped. 

A powerless Germany — that is — a sick Ger- 
many — a Germany that is not doing her part 
as a member or organ in the body of the world, 
will make the world sick. The world will 
have to go to bed with her — or carry Germany 
around with her for centuries as chronic peri- 
tonitis. 

The world can bluster vaguely and bigly all 
it likes about amputating Germany, but it can- 
not stand the operation. 

The only possible way out for the world 
lies in having the sick organ healed. 

The healing of Germany is a matter (as in 
most localized disease) of circulation, of the 
whole body gathering around the sick part and 
making itself felt in it, — pouring out and pour- 
ing in — advertising. 

It is by the whole body's gathering around 
and advertising the whole body to the sick part, 
that the sick part becomes whole. 

When Lloyd George gives the world its 
choice and says that the world will have to 



120 The Air-Line to Liberty 

make Germany either free or powerless, he 
does not offer us a choice at all. 

If instead of evoking health out of Germany 
and advertising and circulating health into 
Germany the world attempts in a last, fool- 
ish, weak, desperate way to end everything 
by making Germany powerless, the world is 
committing suicide. 

It is a thing that Germany might have 
thought of. I like to think that America has 
too much courage to back down into mutilat- 
ing the world she has to live in by making a 
hundred million people powerless on it — by 
emasculating a nation. 

An emasculated Germany would be a 
greater danger to the world than the kind of 
Germany we have now. 

The world cannot afford to have an impo- 
tent Germany. 

We do not want a Germany impotent to do 
wrong. A Germany impotent to do wrong 
will be impotent to do right. Germany will 
have to be carried by the world like some 
splendid moral pauper for five hundred years. 

The world wants to make a free run ahead 



No Halfness, No Hemming 121 

the next five hundred years. It does not want 
to have to load up on its back at the very start 
after this war, a great workhouse for nations. 

Another substitute for the plan of getting 
the attention of nations as a practical working 
method of keeping them reasonable and peace- 
ful, was proposed the other day by the Kaiser. 

The Kaiser told the Pope that Germany 
would like to see peace after this war based on 
the reduction of national armaments. 

Making Germany powerless as a cure for 
militarism will not work. Neither will mak- 
ing the world powerless. 

The only possible way to cure militarism 
now that it is in its present advanced stage is 
to operate on it — to be radical. The only way 
to get millions of people at a time to do a radi- 
cal thing or to have a new idea, is to adver- 
tise. 

Why should America with a weapon to be 
independent with, which is as natural to her 
as advertising, allow herself to be put off at 
the end of this war with a mean, discouraged, 



122 The Air-Line to Liberty 

insipid, little war-cure like the Kaiser's reduc- 
tion of national armaments? 

Instead of advertising the Kaiser's war-cure 
we will advertise ours. 

Fighting about how large our national ar- 
mies shall be, as a substitute for not having 
national armies at all, strikes us as a limp, 
effeminate, unmanly form of peace. 

Peace based on a peevish, haggling reduc- 
tion of national armaments instead of on inter- 
national armament or world police, will be 
half-way war. 

America will not waste her money nor throw 
away the lives of her sons and then after it 
is all over have handed out to her a half-way 
war proposed by militarists or a half-way 
peace proposed by pacifists. 

We have had halfness enough. 

It was halfness that brought on the war. 

Half of each nation wanted peace and half 
of each nation wanted war until they were all 
so afraid of themselves they had to fight each 
other. 

And it was not only halfness that brought on 
the war but it is halfness that is keeping it up. 



No Halfness, No Hemming 123 

And now that the war is to be ended we pro- 
pose to see to it in America that it is ended 
all one way or all the other. America will not 
yield to the higgling of the pacifists to end the 
war with a half-cured Germany. It seems to 
America that negotiating for peace with Ger- 
many before Germany is operated on — cut- 
ting Germany open to take out her war appen- 
dix and then sewing her up while it is still in, 
is fair neither to Germany nor to the world. 
If Germany will not remove her appendix 
herself we will. Germany is the sickest na- 
tion the earth has ever dreamed of — so sick 
that it has made all the rest of the world sick 
to have her in it, and it is not the pacifists 
who are believing in Germany and who are 
being fair and human with Germany. The 
people who are standing out for Germany to- 
day are the people who are making it possible 
for her to be her real self and who are fighting 
for her real self. The Germany beyond and 
ahead is all right. The trouble with Germany 
is her Hohenzollern appendix. She has been 
letting her appendix be her colon for forty 
years. 



124 The Air-Line to Liberty 

America does not want to be, in ending this 
war, as superficial about human nature as the 
Kaiser was in starting it. 

Conquering men, as a way of getting what 
one wants out of them — which was the Kai- 
ser's idea — is superficial. 

Making men want to let us have what we 
want, is a manlier, more thorough and more 
practical measure and is being practised daily 
and constantly on an enormous scale in the 
sight of all men by the advertising of business 
men. Millions of people every day in Amer- 
ica are being made to want things that they 
have thought they did not want. 

We will do with Germany what daily we 
are doing with one another. 

When our statesmen begin reading the back 
pages of magazines the way ordinary people 
do and take a leaf from them, we will turn 
each other's advertising men loose on each 
other instead of soldiers, spies, poisonous 
gases, censors, submarines and lawyers. Na- 
tions will protect themselves the way banks 
do, by keeping lighted up all night. 



No Halfness, No Hemming 125 

The nations that do their advertising best 
— that is to say, the nations that conform most 
closely to the law of advertising and select 
things to say and things to do which arrest 
attention the most and hold it the longest, 
will be the ones that will win the war. They 
will be the nations that for themselves and 
others will get what they want. 

A nation that cannot arrest attention is 
powerless. 

A nation that arrests it and cannot hold it 
is powerless. 

The disposal of everything at the end of the 
war — the making of the will of the world will 
fall to the nation that arrests and holds the at- 
tention of the other nations the longest. 

The nation that holds the attention of the 
other nations the longest, is going to be the 
nation that holds it the most willingly. 

How can a nation hold the attention of an- 
other nation the most willingly? 

By picking out things the other nation wants 
to have advertised in it, things which the other 
nation wants to know and keeps wanting to 
know and advertising them. By picking out 



126 The Air-Line to Liberty 

and advertising to the people concerned in 
each nation their mutual interests with people 
of the other nation, until the people see them 
as they are. 

When the mutual interests of nations are 
seen scientifically and as they are, by the ex- 
perts in mutual interests, and are then adver- 
tised so that everybody sees them, the natural 
war antitoxin will have been discovered, will 
have been introduced by advertising in each 
nation, administered by advertising in each 
nation, and war will be at an end. 



Ill 



AMERICA, HER ALLIES AND THE 
WORLD 



Chapter I 

THE KIND OF AMERICA AMERICA WANTS 

I WOULD like to see my country at the 
present moment stop hemming and hawing 
and looking every which way before the Fire 
— leap to the rescue of Europe and make some 
great national drive for the future of the 
world. I like to think it is natural to my 
country at heart to do a thing in the way a man 
I saw in the Pennsylvania Station the other 
day would do it. 

I saw him on the moving stairway running 
up the running steps two steps at a time. There 
was something about it — about his running his 

own running on top of the running the steps 

127 



128 The Air-Line to Liberty 

were doing for him besides, which made me 
feel about him the way I would like to feel 
about my country. I shall never see him again 
I suppose, but as he flashed up past me and as 
I saw him flying out through that hole of light 
that was 34th Street, I wanted to follow him 
and know him. He was not content as other 
people were with sogging back on a single 
step and letting himself be hauled up into 
New York on a kind of crowd-windlass — 
hauled up like so much merchandise or like 
meat taken off of himself or like flour on a belt. 
I do not deny that there are people who nat- 
urally ride in everything. I am not unaware 
that there are people who if all our sidewalks 
everywhere were moving sidewalks, would 
bring out their ottomans and their crickets 
with them when they came out of the house. 
They would walk through the streets sitting 
down. One has to allow for people in every 
nation who are born passengers on events and 
who instead of adding to events or picking out 
a few extra ones and making them happen on 
top of the regular machine-ones, like my 
friend in the Pennsylvania Station, would ex- 



The Kind of America America Wants 129 

pect to be carried. They expect to be rolled 
on casters into History. 

But I will not admit that these people are 
typical Americans in a great crisis of the 
world. 

And yet for the moment why do they seem 
to be? 

And yet for the moment, why is it I was 
obliged for months to watch my country wait- 
ing week after week, morning after morning, 
to be driven into the war on a technicality, or 
to be kept out of the war on a rule or precedent, 
or a piece of moral machinery or international 
law, instead of being eager and full of some 
new constructive desire of her own, which 
made her run with vision to the rescue of the 
future of the world. We are being more spir- 
ited now, of course, but at our best we are only 
being spirited in a kind of glorious hand-to- 
mouth way. We are spirited about stopping 
Germany, but as a mass or a people we are 
not showing our spirit in a grim, passionate 
vision about what America wants to do with 
Germany, or wants to do for the world, when 
Germany is stopped. 



i3° 



The Air-Line to Liberty 



And what America wants to do when Ger- 
many is stopped is all that this war is about, 
is what the seventeen billion dollars are for 
and the flocks of young men's faces flashing 
past us to die. Why is it one does not see any 
one in America, at least hardly any one ex- 
cept the President, going to the top of the Hill 
and looking off? 



Chapter II 131 

THE KIND OF AMERICA EUROPE WANTS 

I WOULD like to state in this chapter my 
programme of what America can do and 
do now to stand out at last, reveal herself to 
the other nations and take her share in the 
struggle we are all going to have after the war 
is over, for the existence of the world. 

But before stating a programme of what we 
will do, I would like to put down in two para- 
graphs a little programme of what we will 
not do. 

We will not take any course of action which 
puts us in the position toward other nations of 
moralizing and idealizing and giving good ad- 
vice. 

For the American people just at the present 
moment to sit down deliberately and calmly on 
an immense chest of money they have made 
out of the sufferings and sacrifices of other 
people and shout to them across the sea good 
advice and moral precepts about how they 
ought to love one another, would be a tragi- 
cal mistake. 

It would be better just now for America to 



132 The Air-Line to Liberty 

get up off its chest and fight the European na- 
tions. It would be better and safer and more 
thoughtful for us to fight all the European na- 
tions at once and fight them indiscriminately 
than to give them good advice. 

They would understand our fighting them 
with guns better. Our fighting them with guns 
at least would not be a mean, cold, comfort- 
able, underhanded way of fighting, like stand- 
ing in perfect safety where no one can hit back 
and across a huge gulf of sorrow and yearning 
and despair, shouting worsted peace-mottoes 
at them and telling them like innocent 
thoughtless children, like little prigs playing 
dolls in a nursery, what we would do if we 
were they. 

Any invention this nation may have to pro- 
pose to nations abroad, it will first propose and 
first set working at home. If the older nations 
want to give good advice to us we would nat- 
urally expect them to give us good advice they 
have used and we would naturally expect too 
to watch them using it for awhile and see 
how it worked. Then we could ask them for 
their good advice. Of course if this principle 



The Kind of America Europe Wants 133 

works one way it works the other and the first 
thing America will arrange for with any good 
advice it may have haunting it, which it might 
like to hand out to other people, will be to 
first work out its good advice on itself. 

In the old days, people who were trying to 
be prophets — whole nations of them at once, 
do not seem to have had very much success, 
because they had so little sense of humor. 
They seemed to think it would work to begin 
practising at once on other nations, but if we 
are going to be prophets in America we would 
rather make our start in a small way at first 
and begin by practising at being prophets on 
ourselves. 

This is the first of the things we will not do. 
America in dealing with other nations will 
hold back as from the jaws of hell itself, from 
giving them good advice. 

Another thing America will hold back 
from, in dealing with other nations, as from 
the jaws of hell itself, will be pretending that 
she is one kind of a nation when she knows, 
and everybody knows, that nearly half of her 
is another. 



134 The Air-Line to Liberty 

America is a democracy. For America to 
adopt a plan of national defense, or national 
partnership in world defense, when fifteen 
or twenty people more want it than do not 
want it, or when fifteen or twenty thousand 
more people or two or three million more peo- 
ple in the country want it than do not want 
it, would be superficial and autocratic. A na- 
tion cannot hope to express itself powerfully 
except by expressing itself as it is. Any pro- 
gramme America may adopt will have to work 
out some way of expressing its majority and 
minority both and of being honest with other 
nations and with her own people about them. 
It is unscientific, ineffectual and unpractical 
in expressing a nation to leave nearly half of 
it out. 

The older and more sedate nations of Eu- 
rope are apt to look upon us, not without a cer- 
tain justice, as a more or less childlike people 
and the last thing we want to do — because 
we happen to be by a technicality the oldest 
republic — is to take a sudden grown-up tone 
with our worldly-wise Allies, tell them just 
how we want them to combine with us, pick 



The Kind of America Europe Wants 135 

out ways they will be allowed to help and an- 
nounce to them glibly America's programme 
for reconstructing the world to-morrow morn- 
ing. 

The first requisite of any programme Amer- 
ica may seek to initiate for herself and her Al- 
lies for the permanent peace of the world, will 
be its modesty and tentativeness. 

Probably the best way for a big, overgrown, 
helplessly young nation of one hundred mil- 
lion people, stepping for the first time, in this 
strange solemn moment into the presence of 
the older nations of the world, to be modest 
will be to announce a programme which is 
natural and instinctive for her, which is for 
herself alone at first and which is provisional 
and experimental even for herself. The other 
nations can stand by and look on if they like — 
can watch the Children playing in children's 
serious way with their programme — with what 
they like and what is natural to them; and 
perhaps it will turn out and perhaps not (as 
has been the way of children in this weary 
world before) that we have something for our 
elders. 



136 The Air-Line to Liberty 

They can take it or leave it. 

I have felt that the programme I am about 
to propose as a possible one for America and 
eventually for her Allies if they want it, will 
have these advantages. I like it because it 
seems to me to be indigenous, to be natural 
to our American genius, and because in a new 
country like ours it takes us as we are, and 
uses the kind of men we have. 



Chapter III 137 

THE KIND OF WAR DEPARTMENT AMERICA 
WOULD LIKE 

ANY particular war that any particular 
nation may have at a particular time, 
with any other nation is based on a row of 
particular illusions the two nations have about 
each other, and if instead of mooning and gen- 
eralizing either one of these nations will go 
to work, pick each of these illusions out, dis- 
entangle it, isolate it, excavate it like the ty- 
phoid germ in Havana, war in the world in 
due time, like typhoid in Havana now, will 
never get a chance to start. 

Business men and scientific men remove il- 
lusions every day. They make all their money 
out of removing illusions. 

I wish our War Department, instead of de- 
pending so much on a few generals and ad- 
mirals and asking them how to defend the 
country, would call in Sears & Roebuck of 
Chicago and ask them how they would do it. 

If a few days were spent by our War De- 
partment or Preparedness Department in ask- 
ing the Childs Restaurants or the Ten Cent 



138 The Air-Line to Liberty 

Stores or the Filenes of Boston how they man- 
age to strike up mutual interests with people 
and serve them and be served by them and 
how they manage to keep up a glorious and 
profitable peace with them so that everybody 
who has anything to do with them runs in to 
help them, I venture to say that before many 
months we would find ourselves with a War 
Department in America that would arrest the 
attention and respect and command the hope 
and the immediate expectation of all the na- 
tions of the world. I do not yield to any one 
in appreciating General Leonard Wood and 
Admiral Sims and I am not in favor of abol- 
ishing armament offhand, but I do believe 
(and I do believe it can be proved so that we 
will all believe it) that Mr. Liggett of the 
Liggett chain of drugstores can be got to do 
more, if he will once give his mind to it, for 
the defense of this country from Germany or 
from Japan or Mexico than General Leonard 
Wood can. 

National self-defense and good business are 
a good deal alike. 

Good business consists in removing from 



War Department America Would Like 139 

people illusions that they do not want to buy. 
In every large permanent business that we 
have built up in this country, we have based 
our success upon the shrewd, aggressive re- 
moval from people of illusions they seem to 
have that we cannot serve them and that they 
cannot serve us, and upon a deliberate, pro- 
gressive, persistent and good-natured substi- 
tuting for this illusion they have about us, a 
daily habit and conviction that their interests 
and our interests which look different are 
really mutual. 

Peace is mutual attention and the way to 
gain peace and keep it, is for men to get each 
other's attention. The moment people get 
each other's attention, peace is automatic. 

The problem of preparedness in America 
is the problem of making other nations look. 

We can propose to defend ourselves in 
America in three ways: 

By armored plate, helmets and fortresses. 

By being more aggressive and shooting na- 
tions that shoot us. 

By being still more aggressive and by get- 
ting the attention of nations who shoot us, to 



140 The Air-Line to Liberty 

their own interests and to mutual interests so 
that they will not want to shoot. 

I submit that this more aggressive and mas- 
terful form of self-defense is not only the one 
that is most worthy of a great country like 
ours, but that it is the one that goes best with 
our natural gifts and the one that the world 
expects and hopes for from us. I submit also 
that the science of defending this nation by a 
campaign abroad of getting the attention of 
other nations, and by a campaign at home of 
letting them have our attention, is not only 
the most original but the most permanent, eco- 
nomical, and conclusive way for our War De- 
partment to secure a suitable and practical na- 
tional preparedness. 

Mr. Bryan has strung together a few treaties 
to defend us and the Government is now hur- 
rying up dreadnoughts and armies, and in 
advancing my idea of national defense, I do 
not want to be understood as taking a stand 
against either armies or treaties as far as they 
go, but I do submit it to the American people 
that treaties and armies are weak and conven- 
tional, that they are not aggressive enough for 



War Department America Would Like 141 

a country like ours, that treaties and armies as 
compared with the Childs Restaurants and 
Sears, Roebuck & Company and the Filenes 
of Boston are effeminate, timid and superfi- 
cial in dealing with human nature, in mas- 
tering and commanding the desires and ac- 
tions of crowds of people. They totally over- 
look the principles, the science and the psy- 
chology of crowds and the methods and prin- 
ciples of getting the attention, of winning the 
good will and the peaceful and active cooper- 
ation of great masses of men. 

Peace is mutual attention between peoples. 
Getting the attention of other peoples and 
deliberately presenting them with our atten- 
tion, is a problem that calls for the recognition 
and enlistment by our War Department of 
men who have the training and the genius our 
typical American business men have for get- 
ting people who do not want anything to do 
with them and who will not notice them, to 
notice them and deal with them. Let our 
War Department call in Julius Rosenwald of 
Sears, Roebuck & Company, tell him that it 
is going to run a Preparedness-With Section 



142 The Air-Line to Liberty 

alongside its Preparedness-Against Section 
and ask him to do it. 

The only thorough way peace can be 
brought to pass is in the same way that Sears 
& Roebuck of Chicago struck up a mutual 
interest with millions of lonely farmhouses 
out in the country thousands of miles away 
and made every farmhouse feel just around 
the corner from Michigan Avenue. No farm- 
er would ever have believed until Sears & 
Roebuck came along, that any particular direct 
permanent daily connection between his own 
kitchen and farmyard and Michigan Avenue 
existed or could be worked up, and no farmer 
or cottager would ever have believed that liv- 
ing by postal card, living with a kind of cata- 
logue or big loose bible of what one was go- 
ing to want at one's elbow, would ever come 
to anything as a practical method of life. 

But Sears & Roebuck believed it. They 
had the salesman and advertising attitude to- 
ward their belief — a kind of prehensile faith 
in the mutual interests of Michigan Avenue 
and the lonely roads of this country, and they 
organized ways, by advertising and drama* 



War Department America Would Like 143 

tizing their idea, of making everybody believe 
them. Before anybody quite knew what had 
happened, Sears & Roebuck, out of nothing 
except a state of mind and a few personal ideas 
in their private minds of how their interests 
and other people's belonged together, had con- 
structed a vast web of mutual desire and of 
mutual help for a whole people. They had 
made the United States, from Maine to Cali- 
fornia, a kind of big country village. With 
parcel post, with postal cards, lists, catalogues 
and telephones, all America could be seen at 
last dropping in quietly every day on Michi- 
gan Avenue, Chicago. 

The problem of making war impossible by 
removing its causes and by deliberately sub- 
stituting before everybody's eyes and with ev- 
erybody's consent a daily working programme 
of mutual attention or peace is, both in its 
essence and its method, a distinctly advertising 
problem. Nothing less strenuous, less patient, 
indefatigable and penetrating, less hopeful and 
persistent than the way advertising men and 
salesmen pursue a mutual interest until they 
get one and make it a permanent one and set 



144 The Air -Line to Liberty 

it to work, is going to be equal to the task of 
defending our nation from war. 

The way for two nations that are afraid of 
fighting each other and are raising armaments 
against each other, to be at peace is to swap 
advertising campaigns and say to one another 
with big appropriations back of them: "If 
you will let all your people know certain good 
things about us, we will let all our people 
know certain good things about you." 

The reason that treaties are treated like 
scraps of paper is that nobody excepting a law- 
yer here and there ever notices a treaty or 
ever takes a treaty seriously as a part of his 
daily life. No treaty has ever attracted the at- 
tention of a nation like a safety razor or made 
itself a part of the daily working belief of 
the people like a breakfast food. Treaties 
are insipid, frail, unread, cold, lonesome, 
legal documents and have no grip in them and 
do not have and cannot get the attention and 
the personal interest of all of the people. 
Breakfast foods and soaps succeed in being 
taken more seriously than treaties because they 
are based on aggressive good-natured grit in 



War Department America Would Like 145 

making people listen and in faith in what will 
happen if they do, and because at last they 
strike up a daily mutual interest with people 
which keeps people interested in them day af- 
ter day. 

When Sears & Roebuck or somebody like 
them are once put in charge of what might be 
called the Preparedness-With Section of our 
War Department in distinction from the Pre- 
paredness-Against Section, and when they 
have proceeded to lay out their campaign of 
discovering and establishing daily mutual in- 
terests of Germans and Americans, and Mex- 
icans and Americans, with the same persist- 
ence and precision they employed between 
lonely farmhouses and Michigan Avenue, 
what will soon begin to happen? I do not 
want to boast too early, but I am willing to 
guess for one that the big business genuises 
and the gifted salesmen we all are watching 
to-day traipsing off to Plattsburg to learn to 
shoot and to learn to march, will soon be ask- 
ing to be moved over, great platoons of them, 
by Mr. Newton D. Baker from the Prepared- 



146 The Air-Line to Liberty 

ness-Against Section of the War Department 
to the Preparedness-With Section. 

We all want preparedness. We only rush 
to Plattsburg because we want to rush some- 
where and because our War Department is 
a lopsided, old-fashioned contrivance for self- 
defense, a weak and negative affair which has 
arranged fighting interests and not mutual in- 
terests for us to rush to. I submit it to our 
War Department that the captains, lieuten- 
ants, majors and admirals of mutual interests, 
as well as fighting interests, should have a 
Plattsburg, too. 

It is not necessary to crow in advance 
over what business men of our more creative 
American type can do to make our War De- 
partment efficient and always ahead of its job 
instead of always behind, and I am not claim- 
ing that Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roe- 
buck or other men who have our typical 
American salesmanlike genius, who have 
proved themselves experts in the science of 
discovering and organizing mutual interests, 
will do better in defending the country than 



War Department America Would Like 147 

General Leonard Wood or Admiral Sims. 
The only claim I make is that this more 
American idea of self-defense shall be tried 
out by our War Department alongside the 
old or European one, and that for every 
dreadnought and army corps added to our 
national defense, Mr. Baker should let us 
have one dreadnought's worth and one army 
corps' worth of what Sears & Roebuck could 
do in the way of advertising campaigns, 
mutual-business-building campaigns, and in 
the scientific breaking down and removing of 
the illusions of lonely nations as they have 
removed the illusions of lonely farmers. The 
country has a right to have placed alongside 
one another these two methods of prepared- 
ness — advertising and shooting (or looking 
ready to shoot) where we can all watch them 
and see how they work. When we have given 
advertising and attention-steering as fair and 
as expensive a trial as we have already given 
gun-practice, submarines and asphyxiating 
gases, America will have a matter-of-fact, 
common-sense, demonstrated basis for deter- 
mining at last what kind of preparedness it 



148 The Air -Line to Liberty 

wants in its War Department and in what 
proportions it wants it. The enormous sums 
of money our War Department is asking us 
all to pay will then be divided off between 
the Preparedness-Against Section and the 
Preparedness-With Section as the people 
think best. When we have seen how the two 
sections work side by side and have seen which 
section does the most with the least money and 
which section is the more thorough and re- 
moves war the farthest, our Preparedness- 
Against Department will naturally by com- 
mon consent and without risk cost us less and 
less. We are all agreed about this. Almost 
nobody wants a Preparedness-Against Section 
in our War Department if it can be helped. 
Why should it not be helped? Why should 
not our War Department help organize 
among the business men, salesmen and adver- 
tising men of this country a program of mak- 
ing General Wood and Admiral Sims, as they 
themselves would most profoundly desire, 
every year less necessary and less expensive? 



Chapter IV 149 

A PROGRAMME FOR GETTING THE KIND OF WAR 
DEPARTMENT AMERICA WOULD LIKE 

THE programme for national self-expres- 
sion which as it seems to me would set 
America right with the world and with her- 
self, and which could be acted on without 
delay is as follows: 

First: I propose that our War Department, 
whether we drop the name "War Depart- 
ment" or not — for the present — be practically 
treated by our people, and practically organ- 
ized, as a National Defense Department. 
The National Defense Department may be 
expected to defend us in every possible way a 
nation can be defended and will be divided 
into two sections — one section to be called the 
Military Section and the other the Mutual 
Section. The first section shall be conducted 
by soldiers and natural fighters. The second 
by business or advertising men or natural 
co-workers. The Mutual Section which could 
be manned by men who have shown genius 
in the organization of the better type of trusts 
and who have gifts in putting through large 



150 The Air -Line to Liberty 

business deals based on the discovery and 
pursuit of the mutual interests of men and 
classes — shall devote itself in dealing with 
nations to combining mutual interests and to 
what might be called Preparedness-with. 
The Military Section in dealing with nations 
shall devote itself in the conventional way to 
Preparedness-against. 

Second: I propose that the appropriations 
for the Preparedness-against Section of the 
National Defense Department be made by 
Congress in proportion to the size of the ma- 
jority in America that seems to depend on it 
and believe in it. I propose that the Pre- 
paredness-with Section — the advertising and 
business section of the Defense Department — 
be given an appropriation to carry on its work 
in proportion to the size of the minority that 
believes in it. 

Third: I propose that in announcing to 
other nations that she has organized her 
National Defense Department in two sections 
(The Mutual or Constructing Section and the 
Military orDestroyingSection) America shall 
say explicitly to the other nations that there 



Programme for Getting War Department 151 

are more people just at this moment in 
America who put their faith in the Destroy- 
ing Section than in the Constructing Section 
and that even the people who believe in the 
Constructing Section do not believe in having 
as much money spent on the Constructing 
Section as is spent on the other. They are 
not numerous enough — at least during the 
German menace as it stands to-day — to de- 
mand that for every fifteen million dollar 
dreadnought the nation allows for its Destroy- 
ing Section, a dreadnought's worth of nation- 
advertising and nation-dramatizing shall be 
allowed to the Constructing Section. 

The minority, in having its tax money spent 
on the kind of defense it believes in, may be 
wrong for the moment (or at least until the 
present special German scare is over) in sup- 
posing that it is nearly as large as the majority 
and that it ought to spend nearly as much of 
the money; but if for every whole dread- 
nought's worth of looking terrible and as if 
we were going to shoot, half a dreadnought's 
worth is spent by our people on understand- 
ing and being understood, the appropriation 



152 The Air-Line to Liberty 

will be large enough to give a fair test and to 
prove to the nation very soon which gives 
back to it the most for its money — its Under- 
standing Army or its Standing Army. 

Fourth: In the meantime the majority in 
America will make a definite announcement 
to the world. 

But in a period of panic and while Ger- 
many is still threatening the world, the ma- 
jority in America will announce that it is not 
ready to have the National Defense Depart- 
ment spend as much money on its Construct- 
ing Section, or Section for getting nations to 
do things with us, as on our Section for mak- 
ing them afraid of us. But in emphasizing 
the Military Section more and the Mutual 
Section less, the majority will tell the world 
that it hopes it is wrong, that it is allowing 
deliberate and elaborate arrangements to be 
made to prove that it is wrong. 

Fifth: There is not a nation on earth that 
does not wish that some great nation that is 
rich and strong enough and has time and 
freedom enough would act at once as a kind 
of public National Laboratory of Self-defense, 



Programme for Getting War Department 153 

loaned to all nations, paying the bill itself, 
and having the courage and running the risk 
and furnishing the men itself, and slowly 
working out in the sight of all, the new and 
more modern method of national safety in 
which all the world believes already in its 
heart and which it will believe in its mind, 
the first moment some really great nation will 
have the spirit and give the time, money and 
men to try the experiment out. 

I have seen that America will no longer 
stand idle or look askance at the present 
struggle of the world because she cannot make 
up her mind. She will make up her mind to 
make up her mind and will instantly start the 
experiments through which alone she can act 
on the facts, and act at last as a great single- 
hearted, clear-headed nation would like to act 
in her own behalf and in behalf of all, on the 
faith she has stopped mooning over — the faith 
she has worked out. 

From the men of twenty nations bowed 
down in battle, the cry comes back to the men 
of America that we shall hammer out a work- 



1^4 The Air-Line to Liberty 

ing faith for a nation that shall bring an end 
tojbattles forever. 

I have seen that America will get up off 
the money chest she has been sitting on in this 
war — the money chest the other nations have 
been pouring their last blood and treasure 
into four years, and with deep shame and 
with sublime hope begin at once spending the 
money in the sight of all in a shrewd, believ- 
ing, unstinted experiment in behalf of every 
nation on earth to prove once for all that a 
Cooperating Department set up in a nation 
alongside a War Department can defend it 
better than a War Department, that a Coop- 
erating and Mutual-Interest Department once 
set up in a nation and once in full swing along- 
side a War Department will in a few years 
make a War Department look as left over, as 
lumbering, extravagant and absurd to poli- 
ticians and diplomats as it does now to human 
beings. 

There is not room in this bird's-eye view of 
the programme I want to give in this chapter 
to give the concrete details through which the 
experiment I have in mind could be worked 



Programme for Getting War Department 155 

out, made substantial and convincing, but 
there is reason to believe that the nation that 
wins its trade by advertising in other nations 
and by making other nations understand it, 
can win peace and other things it wants from 
the nations, too. There is reason to believe 
that the specialists, students and experts in 
nation-advertising and nation-dramatizing 
America will employ and develop in the Co- 
operating Section of its Defense Department 
— the men who conceive ways of expressing 
nations in actions and in words, and of touch- 
ing the imaginations of the peoples of other 
nations, will work out such effective means of 
making nations listen to us, and of our listen- 
ing to other nations, and will prove so success- 
ful in advertising the things our people feel 
toward other peoples and the things we want 
to do with them, and get them to do with us, 
that wars and the causes of wars with America 
will be hunted out, anticipated and under- 
mined throughout the earth. 

Gradually the Cooperating Section of our 
National Defense Department will leave the 
fighting or Dreadnought Section so little to 



156 The Air-Line to Liberty 

be afraid of, so little to do and so little to 
think of to get ready to do, that it will be 
sloughed of! in the affections and the imagina- 
tions of the people. 

Sixth: As fast as the imaginations and ex- 
pectations of the people move over from the 
Dreadnought Section to the Cooperating Sec- 
tion, the appropriations of the people will 
move over with them. 

Seventh: When the exploding section of 
our Defense Department, as compared with 
the combining or cooperating section, has 
proved itself unnecessary the term "War De- 
partment" which we now have for our Na- 
tional Defense Department will not only seem 
quaint and odd to us — but in a very few years 
even the new term I have just proposed, "The 
National Defense Department," will seem 
small to us and will be dropped. Our depart- 
ment of preparedness for what the world may 
do to us will have become our department for 
what we can do for the world and with the 
world, and we will want it called our World 
Department. 

Our people will see that a nation that is 



Programme for Getting War Department 157 

nationally engaged in protecting the interests 
of the world will be safe from all nations. 
National defense will at last be recognized as 
a by-product of world defense. Our depart- 
ment of world peace will be operated as 
America's national mirror — its national expert 
authority set up in Washington before which 
every act of business and every act of journal- 
ism or literature — or any form whatever of 
expressing America to other people and of 
making other people trust us or fight us — can 
be referred. "How will this thing we are 
proposing make America look?" each business 
firm will come down to Washington and ask. 

Eighth: Everything I have said about 
America's having a world department in two 
sections for her own self-defense applies to 
every other nation's problem of self-defense. 

When the mutual end of America's World 
Department has sloughed off the military end, 
other nations less fortunately situated to try 
the experiment than we are will be in a posi- 
tion to avail themselves of the results. 

In due time the world will have forty 
World Departments — in as many nations — a 



158 The Air-Line to Liberty 

national mirror in each nation for looking at 
itself from the point of view of the interests 
of others. And when the mutual end of 
America's World Department has made the 
military end of no use to her she can give her 
army and navy away if she wants to, to the 
World League to Enforce Peace, or she can 
put it on the world's scrap heap. Of course 
after World Departments are generally in- 
stalled nobody will want our army and navy. 
Every other nation will have an army and 
navy to give away. 

Ninth: When each nation has an expert 
world department or a corps of specialists de- 
voted to studying everything the people of 
the nation do, from the point of view of the 
mutual interests of all the other nations, it is 
obvious that the thirty or forty World De- 
partments will naturally get together and that 
having the habit of looking at things for a 
nation from a world point of view, they will 
naturally form the World Government in 
three branches: the World Legislature — a 
Clearing House for discussing the common 
problems of nations — the World Executive 



Programme for Getting War Department 159 

for administering the world's will, and the 
World's Court for administering international 
justice; and back of the World's Court, as 
long as is necessary, the World Police or 
world's international army made up of all 
the nations' private armies — denationalized 
and presented outright to the Central Police 
Station of the United States of the World, 
and controlled exclusively by the United 
States of the World for the restraint and con- 
fining of mob-nations and for the subordina- 
tion and segregation of nations which after all 
our world arrangements have been made and 
our world police installed still insist upon 
carrying weapons in the Street of the World 
and on having stupid lonely private armies 
of their own. 

Tenth: It would add to the straightfor- 
wardness and gusto and clear-headedness of 
such action as America may propose to take, 
if the proposition I have made in this chapter, 
through the action of Congress and the Presi- 
dent, could be put to the vote of the people 
at the polls. If the gist of the idea or some 
such modification of it as might seem best 



160 The Air-Line to Liberty 

could be put into two or three short sentences 
and by special referendum submitted to the 
people it would add in the eyes of the world 
to what we mean by it. There would be some- 
thing characteristic and nationally individual, 
almost temperamental, about a great democ- 
racy at just this time having its people all 
speak up in this way. We are not all mili- 
tarists in America and we are not all pacifists, 
but we are reasonable people and I think it 
would mean a good deal to us and to other 
nations, too, to have our people say just how 
reasonable they want to be. 

Would they like to have America establish 
a provisional experimental Two Section Na- 
tional Defense Department or would they 
not? Would they like to see in a reasonable 
way the two kinds of national defense they 
hear so much about frankly tried out along- 
side to see which works best or would they 
not? 









Chapter V 161 

BUSINESS MEN, ADVERTISING MEN, AND WAR 

THE other day in New York a man was 
asked if he would write twelve adver- 
tisements of a little more than one hundred 
words each for twenty-four thousand dollars. 
He declined because the idea of making ten 
million people instead of five million use this 
particular article did not fill him with enthu- 
siasm. Why was he offered this sum of money 
— about two hundred dollars a word — for 
work he could have done in a few days? 

It was because a group of hard-headed 
business men who had tried the thing out over 
and over again had learned that attracting the 
attention and touching the imagination of a 
nation and changing the personal hopes and 
personal desires of millions of people is a 
great science and a more or less exact science 
and that it pays many times over the money 
that is put into it. 

All we have to do to defend ourselves from 
Mexico is to go at the attention of the Mexi- 
can peoples in the same dogged way Ivory 
Soap would. 



1 62 The Air-Line to Liberty 

We are told in our high chairs and by 
Colonel Roosevelt that it is a man's doing a 
thing that counts and not his saying a thing. 
But if one man by saying a thing makes twenty 
million men do a thing, the man's saying it 
counts and it counts to get him to say it. 

Words if they are picked out by the right 
man are actions and if they are picked out by 
a salesman they are money. When people 
who have social ideas believe in words as 
much as men who have business ideas believe 
in words they will begin to get their ideas 
carried out. 

The business men I have just spoken of did 
not care as much as might be wished perhaps 
for words as words, but they had found what 
words could do and as they were going to 
spend a million dollars in buying up large 
tracts of paper throughout the country to put 
a few words in, they naturally took great pains 
to select a man to say which words should be 
used. They wanted a man who would choose 
the words that would attract and hold the 
most attention. 

The idea was that words picked out and 



Business Men, Advertising Men, War 163 

arranged by one man if they could attract 
twice as much attention as words picked out 
by another, would only make it necessary to 
pay for half as much space in the papers. If 
the right man picked out the words, five hun- 
dred thousand dollars' worth of space in the 
papers would be as good as a million dollars' 
worth. 

Of course if by picking out words a man 
could earn or save for other men five hundred 
thousand dollars, most men would call it an 
action for him to save them the five hundred 
thousand dollars. 

Paying him twenty-four thousand out of the 
five hundred thousand he saved for them 
would not necessarily seem too much. 

Attracting men's attention and touching 
their imaginations so that they act and feel in 
a way no one could have expected them to, 
is not only action but it is the wth power of 
action. 

All I am contending for in this chapter is 
that the American government should believe 
in the science of convincing nations as the most 
powerful American business men do. 



164 The Air-Line to Liberty 

The specific causes of war in each nation 
America deals with should be taken up by 
our government in a scientific spirit, point by 
point, worked through as on a block signal 
system, and point by point advertised out of 
existence. 

I do not think I am claiming very much 
for peace in this chapter. I merely would be 
glad to get peace to have as much courage 
about itself and as much faith in itself as al- 
most any soap would. I feel that peace should 
at least come up to the standard of a cracker 
in believing in itself and in spending money on 
itself. Until peace comes up to the standard 
of a cracker in its idea of convincing a nation, 
it is not peace. 



Chapter VI 165 

THE ANTI-TOXIN OF WAR 

npHE idea of having our government install 
-*- an advertising and dramatizing section 
in our Department of National Defense de- 
pends for its value upon what I mean by the 
words advertising and dramatizing. As I 
mean new things by them and as advertising 
is at present a new art which our so-called 
advertising men have developed only about 
five per cent, and as nation-dramatizing is an 
art which does not yet exist and is not even 
old enough to be new, I ask my reader to let 
his final judgment of my programme hold 
over until I can give the details of lines of ac- 
tion I have in mind which the government 
might take up. One or two things have al- 
ready happened which the reader may think 
are pointing my way. 

In the early weeks of the war Lord Kitch- 
ener, by composing and putting on billboards 
before the men of England an amazing series 
of advertisements of the needs of the nation, 
advertised an army of two hundred thousand 
men into an army of three million. The fate 



1 66 The Air-Line to Liberty 

of England and the fate of the world turned 
for a few short weeks on an advertising man 
Lord Kitchener employed to express the needs 
of England to her people. 

America would not need to be confined to 
advertising for recruits. If we had a corps of 
experts in our defense department studying 
things we want other nations to believe and 
how to get them to believe them, we would 
probably find it cheaper to send out advertise- 
ments to those who are against us than to send 
out dreadnoughts against them. At least it 
would seem wise to try at least a dreadnought's 
worth of advertisements first. 

And dramatizing is still better than adver- 
tising in the hands of government experts. 
Not many years ago America thought of 
something to do in China which with the 
single stroke made four hundred million peo- 
ple marvel at her, understand her, love and 
trust her for a thousand years. She returned 
the Boxer indemnity China owed her and had 
paid her, and dramatized what Americans are 
like. 

One way to do with an idea is to express it 



The Anti-Toxin of War 167 

or advertise it in words and the other way is 
to dramatize it or express it in action. People 
in Mexico want to fight us, because ideas about 
us that make them want to fight us have been 
advertised and dramatized in Mexico. The 
way for our War Department to defend us 
from war with Mexico is to advertise and 
dramatize ideas about America that will keep 
them from wanting to fight us. 

This may faintly suggest what I mean by 
having a dramatizing section in our Defense 
Department — a corps of experts in thinking 
of things for America and American business 
men to do that will touch the imaginations of 
nations. It is through their imaginations that 
men come to make war and it is only through 
touching their imaginations and keeping them 
touched that war can be stopped. 

The corps of national experts, psychologists 
and specialists in touching the imagination of 
nations to be called into service by the govern- 
ment and employed by the Mutual Section of 
our National Defense Department will pro- 
ceed in dealing with each suspicious nation to 
plan, organize and carry out the following 



1 68 The Air-Line to Liberty 

programme. The programme which would do 
equally well in getting capital and labor to- 
gether, or classes or individuals, and which 
would plan to remove microbes of latent war 
between two peoples as scientifically and ac- 
curately as typhoid fever was removed in 
Havana, would consist of four main ideas or 
stages : 

First: Discovering a mutual interest. 

Second: Inventing a way of making the 
mutual interest work. 

Third: Advertising the mutual interest so 
that people will want to believe in it and will 
want to make it work. 

Fourth : Dramatizing the mutual interest so 
that people will have to believe in it and will 
have to make it work. 



Chapter VII 169 

THE SPINAL COLUMN OF PEACE 

AMERICA claims that what she is fight- 
ing for in this war is her national ideal. 

Advertising is the spinal column of ideal- 
ism. 

The only way a man with an ideal can be 
anything other than an anaemic or wistful 
person is by expert cool studied advertising — 
by grim hard work in getting attention — by 
inventing a way of precisely, scientifically and 
culminatingly touching the imaginations of 
men with the way his ideals work. Of course 
advertising in this sense includes spending 
money, energy and genius in demonstrating an 
ideal, in dramatizing it in miniature or pre- 
senting a working model of it. 

A man who has a peace ideal, who believes 
in peace as a working method to be substituted 
for war, who is not occupied in 1918 in the 
science of touching men's imaginations, who 
is not scientific about his ideals and who does 
not and cannot treat them daily as driving 
forces in men's lives is not an idealist. An 
idealist who does not and cannot show how 



170 The Air-Line to Liberty 

his ideals work is a yearner and a shirk. 

If peace is mutual attention, the only way 
to secure peace is by inventing ways without 
force to compel attention. Advertising, 
which is the science of compelling attention, 
is the science of peace. 

The League to Enforce Peace will be a 
League to Enforce Attention. 

People fight because they will not listen, 
because no man is shrewd enough to listen to 
them and make them listen to him, because 
expert scientific ways of making people want 
to listen have not been worked out by large 
trained bodies of men as dreadnoughts and 
armies have. The first thing the League to 
Enforce Peace will have to do will be to keep 
people any longer from thinking of peace 
as a vague, helpless, floppy, white dove, as a 
kind of stained-glass effect on real life or as 
a rose window some dear people want put 
into this serious business-factory and gov- 
ernment-factory of a world. Through the 
science of compelling men to listen, peace 
shall come to be regarded as a kind of radio- 
activity of the human mind in getting what it 



The Spinal Column of Peace iji 

wants. Peace, instead of being a show, a kind 
of spiritual flourish, is going to be the com- 
mon human sense of men raised to the wth 
power in getting what they want of other men. 
World-peace or world-team-play is the only 
way a world can be made to work. It is the 
poeticalness of peace that is holding it back. 
Until peace is conceived and presented in at 
least one wing of the League to Enforce Peace 
as a stern shrewd implacable substitute for 
war, it is worse than nothing. 

If the League to Enforce Peace is going to 
avail itself of this stupendous and unique op- 
portunity to represent and converge the visions 
of a whole people into a single and concerted 
action it will probably find it better to let the 
different kinds of people enforce peace in 
their own way and organize them and help 
them to do it. 

The League will try to get hold of every- 
body it can possibly get hold of in this coun- 
try who has any way of enforcing peace that 
he sees vividly and concretely. It will provide 
for people to work at once in enforcing peace 
in the particular ways they see to enforce it. 



172 The Air-Line to Liberty 

It will be especially careful to make the most 
of those pacifists who have shown that they 
have courage. 

I believe that all pacifists who have any 
fight in them and who have some other idea of 
peace than going about stopping people will 
be needed by the League to Enforce Peace. 
Pacifists who can make people go must not be 
wasted. 






Chapter VIII 173 

FIGHTING IT OUT 

IF the League to Enforce Peace is to begin 
by making a drive for typical, character- 
istic and American ideas for defending a 
nation from war, I imagine that the first rea- 
son it will find for shaping out such a sample 
Defense Department for a nation as I have 
outlined will be its implicit trust in the fol- 
lowing axiom: 

A fire department which specializes on 
being ready to put fires out when it has al- 
lowed them to get going, which is precisely 
what our War Department is supposed to do 
with wars, would be admitted by us all to be 
a second-rate fire department even in putting 
fires out. 

Nine-tenths of our fire organization and 
effective fire-fighting to-day in America has 
been transferred from measures for putting 
fires out to measures for not letting fires start. 

Why should not the War Department of 
the United States of America take steps to 
begin to run itself on as intelligent a principle 
as the Fire Department in almost any back 



174 The Air-Line to Liberty 

county town in this country? Why should 
our American War Department keep on try- 
ing to defend this country from wars in the 
same way that people not many years ago were 
defending it from flies? We fought flies for 
fifty years in America by arranging little 
mountains of manure everywhere all about us 
for flies to be conceived in and born in, and 
then spreading molasses on paper for the flies 
to stick in and die in. We felt efficient about 
flies and did not propose to submit to flies and 
proposed to show flies we could fight them. 
With garbage piled up around our doors we 
used to have those elaborate little cages or 
what might be called chandeliers of dying and 
struggling flies, hanging up over our eating 
tables for flies to get caught in the buzz in 
while we ate. 

This is what our War Department does 
with war. 

We are not doing things like this with flies 
now and why should our American War De- 
partment be run, and run exclusively, on this 
old manure-and-fly-paper garbage-and-buzz 
principle in defending the country from wars 



Fighting it Out 175 

it does not do, or arrange to do, a single thing 
to prevent from breeding all around it? The 
problem of fighting flies has been essentially 
solved in America. It was a scientific prob- 
lem, partly advertising, partly biology and 
partly legislation, which put the fly on a new 
basis in American life, and it is going to be 
the same with wars — partly a scientific prob- 
lem, an expert study in international human 
nature and in international advertising and 
dramatizing our national idea, and partly a 
matter of international law and of police work 
at home and abroad with the people who make 
America look as if somebody would have to 
fight her. 

A state of suspicion between two countries 
can be as scientifically, implacably and relent- 
lessly dealt with as typhoid fever in Havana. 
The study and the mastery of the attention of 
men who suspect us because they will not listen 
to us, is as accurate and precise a science as 
bridge building and as electrifying of rail- 
roads. We create in this way spiritual rail- 
roads or a system of rapid transit between 



176 The Air-Line to Liberty 

minds. The American people could begin in 
the case of Carranza and the people behind 
him by saying: "We do not wonder that you 
suspect us but we are not willing because some 
of us can be justly suspected that all of us 
should be dragged into the war. Who are 
these people among us that you suspect? 
What are their names? Let us deal with them 
one by one and prove to you that they do not 
represent us and that instead of fighting you 
we will fight them. Where we are wrong, we 
will remove the wrong. Where you are 
wrong, we will remove and pay to remove 
among your people the look of being wrong. 
We do not wonder that you Mexicans suspect 
us. We admit that there has been every rea- 
son in the past that you should. It is up to 
us with a record such as we have had, or such 
a record as irresponsible Americans in Mex- 
ico have made us have, to prove to you that 
the suspicions which we have allowed to be 
aroused about us are only true of a part of us. 
We can prove to you that we are going to take 
hold of this part, keep it in hand, and that 






Fighting it Out 177 

there will be no further cause for disturb- 
ance." 

We are a proud, foolish, reckless nation in 
the way we have allowed America to be rep- 
resented in Mexico, particularly by our busi- 
ness interests. The government will now take 
hold and make our business interests in Mex- 
ico dramatize to the people what Americans 
as a whole are like. 

The world has been a good deal disturbed 
and shocked at the secret service system the 
Germans have employed around the world 
and the spy system which has been used in all 
nations against them by the Germans in time 
of peace. America will establish what might 
be called perhaps a kind of reverse spy sys- 
tem and establish in America thousands of 
spies-for, instead of spies-against the Mexican 
people. 

We will do this with all other nations. 
It might be said that the various activities 
of the nation which will advertise and drama- 
tize it to other nations are already being 
attended to in a scattered, inarticulated way 
by the various secretaries and departments of 



178 The Air-Line to Liberty 

the Government. They could still be so con- 
ducted. 

But while of course the Secretary of the 
Navy, and the Secretary of the Treasury, and 
the Secretary of the Interior, and Labor, and 
Commerce, would all be concerned in it, the 
controlling power — the power that puts all 
these powers together — should be kept in the 
hands of the Defense Department, or as it 
would come to be called, the World Depart- 
ment, which looks at all activities in the nation 
from the point of view of advertising our 
nation to other nations and from the point of 
view of making our nation understood by 
other people and of defending the peace of 
the nation and the fate of the world; and what 
is still more true — it is important that the two 
ideas of National Defense — the cooperating 
and the fighting ideas — should both be tried 
out side by side in the same department — in 
marked contrast, where all the people could 
see how things were going at a glance. 



IV 

A DECLARATION OF FAITH FOR 
NATIONS 

Chapter I 

A CONFESSION OF PEACE 

THIS is the declaration of the belief of one 
man speaking for himself — speaking for 
that little nation in miniature that he — like 
every man — carries around in his own mind. 

But down underneath it is a part of his be- 
lief that a hundred million other men believe 
it, that it expresses gropingly the temper, the 
subconscious power of a people, that the hun- 
dred million people are going to hammer out 
of it, and hammer out of it soon, a working 
faith for themselves and a candidate-faith for 
all nations. 

The best way to organize a nation is to find 
179 



180 The Air -Line to Liberty 

some fundamental honest principle of division 
between the men in it and divide them of! into 
groups where they can all be themselves. 

What we need in America next, to prepare 
for action, is to take an inventory of the men 
in it. 

We will take a long thorough look over the 
country. We will ask all the men in this coun- 
try who have things they would die for and 
fight for to get together into one great group, 
and all those who stand for safety-first to get 
together in another. We will then proceed 
to look over the group that has things it will 
die for, and we will let each man decide 
which way he can fight best, and we will all 
proceed to divide off as fighters into the group 
of men and into the kind of fighting, in which 
our gifts and temperaments count the most. 

The great fundamental line of cleavage in 
this country between men is that some men 
have some sense of adventure and some fight 
in them in getting what they want for this 
country and the world and the other men are 
mere yearners. The American crisis turns on 
getting our yearners who belong in all politi- 



A Confession of Peace 181 

cal parties sorted out and got out of the way 
and put in a great yearning party by them- 
selves where they can do all the yearning they 
want, in just the way they like to yearn, with- 
out being mixed up with the rest of us, where 
they will not have to act as they do now with 
men who hate them for yearning and who 
want to strike out and do things. 

Mr. Ford's peace ship was wrong because 
instead of creating something, it yearned to 
stop something. The proposed International 
Stockholm Peace Conference was wrong be- 
cause it was negative, because all the men be- 
hind it planned for, and saw, was to yearn and 
stop something. Lord Lansdowne's proposed 
diplomatic haggling with Germany was 
wrong because the utmost he yearned for was 
to stop something. If this war is going to be 
stopped by people who do not see any further 
than just stopping it, life in this world for the 
next hundred years will consist of nothing for 
all of us but preparation to begin another. 

The only way to stop war is to stop yearn- 
ing for the end of war and create something 



182 The Air-Line to Liberty 

better, drive into the situation a substitute for 
war which makes war ridiculous, which makes 
war look pale and impractical. 

There is no object in peace. A peace which 
is just being peace and which is not a manly, 
vigorous, conclusive, implacable substitute for 
war will not do. The peace that will do, is 
not a peace that stops fighting, but a peace 
that fights harder and fights better, that makes 
war feel small, mean, lonely and left out of 
the world. We propose to stop the war with 
a substitute for war. The substitute shall be a 
militant, massive, uncompromising, terrific 
massing in advertising of the sublime mutual 
listening and mutual self-assertions of nations, 
the setting up of agreeing-engines, of peace- 
and-understanding-machinery, the supreme 
daily statement of the wills, of the shrewd sub- 
lime hopes, of the mutual visions of all peo- 
ples of the world. 

The peace that is going to be established 
after the war by stoppers, by men whose minds 
are operating merely as war-corks, will not be 
peace. It will be a breathlessness waiting 



A Confession of Peace 183 

to fight, unless we gain a conclusive, physical 
victory over the Germans. 

The peace we will have without victory is 
going to be negative. 

I find my face is set against all such pro- 
posals as Lord Lansdowne's diplomacy prop- 
osition to stimulate the liberal party and the 
democratic propaganda in Germany. If 
America skips her gun-advertisement and 
tries to get the other ones in first it will merely 
result in a patched up and bargained peace, 
based on Germany's essential military victory. 
The victory we want with Germany is vic- 
tory with our guns first, then a permanent 
peace based on a permanent substitute for war. 
What we are fighting for is not a mere victory 
and not a mere peace but for the adoption of 
a programme for the world which shall bring 
peace and which shall make possible for The 
Allies a big, generous, fair, many-sided vic- 
tory over all war, a victory not merely for The 
Allies, but for all the world. 

World peace is like anything else that 
people do not quite yet know they want. 



184 The Air-Line to Liberty 

It has to be advertised to them until they 
know they want it. The present war is a very 
good advertisement for world peace. Every- 
body practically in all nations concerned has 
been got to agree to it. Especially the nations 
that are fighting, agree to it. 

What people have not been got to agree to 
is how to get it. 

How to get it is a question which will never 
be settled until we all arrange advertisements 
and experiments to find out. Nothing but ad- 
vertising what we know, and experimenting 
what we do not know, will bring peace. 



Chapter II 185 

A CONFESSION OF HOPE 

1 WOULD like to say to myself and to my 
reader in this chapter what I want to do 
in this book. 

I want to act as the salesman of a substitute 
for war. I want to sell advertising to twenty 
nations as a substitute for this war and as an 
organized and permanent substitute for all 
wars. Unless I can sell advertising to the 
twenty nations as a substitute the twenty na- 
tions will feel safe with — sell it to the twenty 
nations and sell it now and sell it in advance, 
I believe in having every one of the twenty 
nations, especially America, armed to the 
teeth. The only peace I believe in is the kind 
of peace that has the gusto in it to work out 
and work through a substitute for war. If a 
more practical substitute cannot actually be 
proposed and actually adopted, I want arma- 
ment. 

There is one other thing that I apparently 
want, in this book. I do not want to be shoved 
off into being an author. 



1 86 The Air-Line to Liberty 

I do not want to waste my time and my 
reader's time in it in talking about what can 
be done with advertising. 

I want to do it. 

And I want with my reader's help to get 
one hundred million people to help me do it. 

I will not generalize. I will not explain. 
I will not give good advice. I will not yearn. 

If I cannot do the thing I am talking about 
doing, and get one hundred million people 
here in this book in plain sight to help me do 
it, my talking about it means nothing. 

I propose in these pages to set up between 
nations a huge international Central Power 
House and Agreeing-Engine for a planet, put 
one thousand understanding-motors in it and 
run the world, and if I cannot get my own 
people to read the book I propose it in, if I 
cannot make my own small paper-model 
agreeing-engine work, if I cannot even adver- 
tise my idea in my own book, get my own 
people to agree with my idea, why should I 
try to get up on my small tucked-in mountain 
on this planet, like Mount Tom, and pipe 



A Confession of Hope 187 

away to sixty million Germans and to two 
hundred million Russians? 

The reader and I, between us, in these pages 
before we drop the matter of advertising must 
make advertising do what we say it can do. 
It is up to the reader and to me, and to what 
the reader and I can manage to do together — 
this little book. 

It is the most colossally unfinished book ever 
written. 

It takes one hundred million people to 
finish it. 

It is as good as I can do so far, all alone, 
until the hundred million people help. 

Are we men in spirit or are we not? Are 
we salesmen in spirit or are we not? Do we 
believe in advertising, that is, in the salesman- 
ship of ideas? Do we believe in getting Ger- 
mans to take and to take quickly ideas that 
they think they do not want? 

We keep saying every day, a hundred mil- 
lion people of us, to Germans and to Turks, 
that we will not and do not believe in mere 
material might as settling things, that we be- 
lieve the world is ruled by ideas and not by 



1 88 The Air-Line to Liberty 

force. Then we proceed to handle and mar- 
shal ideas toward Germany as if they were 
only wistful, helpless and pretty things. We 
treat ideas and the matter of organizing ideas 
as if there were something queer and different 
and not quite serious about ideas as compared 
with other explosives. We act as if ideas 
underlying a nation's action were a kind of 
dainty or luxury for a nation, an intangible 
effluence, as if ideas were fogs, angel cake 
or marshmallows, instead of what they are as 
a matter of fact — revolution-radium — spirit- 
ual gases for exalting or suffocating great 
peoples. 



Chapter III 189 

A CONFESSION OF FAITH 

1 WOULD like to say what I mean by ad- 
vertising. 

I am using the word in a highly energized 
sense and I do not mean by it what ninety- 
five per cent, of the back pages of the mag- 
azines groping on our pocketbooks mean by it. 

The back pages of the magazines may be 
doing better than the churches in getting at 
people and better than artists and authors, and 
they may serve very well as a point of de- 
parture, a place for our advertising to start 
from, but as superior as they are, to most that 
is being written in America to-day, they would 
not do as models for the greater, more desper- 
ate, sublime advertising twenty nations daily, 
nightly facing, — one day more, one night 
more, — the suicide of the world, must do now. 

All really effective advertisements have to 
be conceived and written by men who are 
specialists in the ideas to be advertised. 

Advertising campaigns for commercial 
ideas are best conceived and best written by 
men who have a creative passion for commer- 



190 The Air-Line to Liberty 

rial ideas and for attracting attention to per- 
sonal and interested ideas. 

Advertising campaigns for nations, of na- 
tional and disinterested ideas, must be con- 
ceived and written by the men who have a 
creative passion for national disinterested 
ideas and for attracting attention to national 
and disinterested ideas. 

Advertising a nation calls for the same 
genius and the same attitude and driving 
power as advertising other things, but in a 
different field. 

I like to use the word advertising for what 
I mean because it stands at its best for some- 
thing that is homely, real, aggressive, insist- 
ent and manful — because it is full of the juice 
of human nature — and because raised to the 
wth power and with radium in it, the word 
advertisement conveys more of what I mean 
than the word education does. Education is 
conceived as a system. Education is laid out. 
And advertising as I see it for my people is a 
kind of overwhelming, resistless, driving- 
vision — a vision-dynamo, the drive wheel of 
a nation, of a nation's hope and of a nation's 



A Confession of Faith 191 

will. Advertising a nation is advertising that 
will have to be written out of the heart, the 
flesh and blood of a people's literature, out of 
the singing of a people's religion, out of the 
prayers of strong men, out of the fight of a 
nation to live, and out of the fight of a nation 
to see a hundred years ahead. 

For such crises as we are facing now, in 
times gone by great peoples wrote Bibles. 



192 Chapter IV 

A DEFINITION BEFORE ACTION 

MY definition of advertising as applied to 
the Advertising Department, the Na- 
tional Defense Department or World Depart- 
ment which I hope America is going to set up, 
is as follows : 

Advertising is the science of being believed. 
Advertising is the selection of words and the 
picking out of actions which make people 
believe. 

It consists in picking out words which peo- 
ple would like to believe if proved and the 
selecting of actions which prove them. 

A national advertisement is a row of a 
nation's ideas so expressed that people will 
want to take them up, and so dramatized that 
they will not want to let them go. 

Advertising consists in finding words or 
actions that express or dramatize the idea so 
that not only the people who are having the 
idea have it, but the people who stand by 
watching them have it, have it by watching 
them have it, and experience it by watching 
them experience it. 



A Definition Before Action 193 

An idea advertised is an idea in the act of 
being experienced. 

Advertising is the art of precipitating an 
experience, of touching the imaginations of 
men and making human nature go. 

I have given my definition of what adver- 
tising is. 

Here is my application of the definition to 
winning the war. 

Advertising to end the war means selecting 
things for the nation to say and things for the 
nation to do, and things for it pointedly not 
to do, which underline the wills and uncover 
the souls of the people. 

This is what a World Department, when 
America has one, will help to do. 



194 Chapter V 

THE CREED OF THE SALESMEN 

THE Secretary of America's Advertising 
Department, if he sat down to write out 
a kind of creed or statement of belief as to 
what he was for, and as to what his depart- 
ment was for, to post in his office and in the 
offices of his assistants, would probably write 
something like this. 

He would express it differently if it were 
to be hung up and so would I if I knew it was 
going to be hung up over the desks of thou- 
sands of attention engineers in Washington 
and throughout the country (and I will some- 
time), but perhaps what follows will do as a 
rough outline from which a creed for an at- 
tention engineer could be made up. 

The science of touching the imagination of 
men and of making human nature go is ap- 
proximately an exact science. It is exact the 
way corn is. Corn may be a week or so late 
or early/but it can be counted on and is loosely 
calculable. 

Advertising is exact in spirit and in prin- 
ciple. 



The Creed of the Salesmen 195 

Certain means applied to human-beings 
produce certain ends. Planting ideas and 
planting corn are both sciences. World-peace 
is a problem in the science of human nature. 
When human nature is recognized as the main 
scientific problem in the science of peace we 
will have peace. 

The other sciences — outside of human na- 
ture — have all been recognized as sciences, 
one by one, by the Scholar. The man who is 
coming nearest to-day, nearest to recognizing 
human nature as a science is the Salesman. 
He is the savior of society. The Salesman is 
to be the savior of society to-day, because he 
sees and daily has the habit of seeing that 
changing a man's mind about something is a 
branch of the science of human nature. The 
salesman may be changing a man's mind about 
a soap or a baking powder, instead of about a 
God or about the fate of twenty nations, but 
he has the root of nation-advertising, nation- 
engineering in him. He has a regular habit 
in a problem of changing a man's mind, of 
going at the man man-fashion. He takes it for 
granted as a matter of course that there must 



196 The Air-Line to Liberty 

be a definite, expert, scientific way of chang- 
ing a man's mind. He finds out in each case 
just what the way is. Then he does it. 

A great statesman to-day is modelled on the 
spiritual lines of the typical salesman of the 
finer kind, a great salesman of national ideas 
instead of commercial ideas; he is a scientist 
in the picking out and the pursuing of the 
mutual interests of the people with whom he 
deals. He has the salesman's spiritual habit 
toward national ideas. He acts on the assump- 
tion that a spiritual problem in international 
human nature — a spiritual problem in human 
nature between two people, two parties or two 
great nations can be treated by a strict scien- 
tific method, can be analyzed, its elements 
enumerated, isolated, grouped, classified, 
taken up in order and that the core of the mis- 
understanding or obsession or mutual hallu- 
cination can be cut around and can be re- 
moved. 

To a statesman or wth-power salesman all 
that is lacking in people or nations when 
they are suffering from an understanding- 
lesion is the disposition to have it cured. 



The Creed of the Salesmen 197 

The first thing to do seems to be to adver- 
tise out of them their indisposition to have the 
misunderstanding cured and advertise into 
them a disposition to let it be cured if it can. 
Most pessimistic observation about being 
understood is made by people who do not even 
want to try. 

Making people want to try to understand 
and be understood is a science as much as 
chemistry or biology. This is merely another 
way of saying that psychology is as serious 
and practical a science as physics or physi- 
ology or electricity and engineering. 

Real men who are doing real things and 
who are as deeply interested in human-beings 
as other people are in bugs, acids and ma- 
chines, and who have worked as hard on 
human nature and on making human nature 
work the way they want it to, as they have on 
making the rest of nature work the way they 
want it to, believe to-day that at least as much 
can be done with human beings as can be done 
with bugs, acids and machines. A great states- 
man is a man who has a daily working faith 
that all that has to be done to get as scientific 



198 The Air-Line to Liberty 

results with human-beings as we do with bugs, 
acids and machines is to apply equally scien- 
tific methods to human-beings, and to get poli- 
ticians to stop treating human-beings as the 
inferiors of bugs, acids and machines. All war 
and all standing armament is based on the 
superficial, lazy, vague conception of human 
nature — as a kind of hopeless muss or chaos 
underneath the magnificent, wonderful, or- 
derly ideas and the superior impulses of bugs 
and acids and machines. . . . 

Regarding human nature in a time of war 
as a kind of lower stratum or bog of disorder- 
liness in nature and not yet developed enough 
to have operative laws or determining organs 
and functions, is unmanly. It does not satisfy 
the more wilful, dogged, scientific spirit of 
the modern man. We are proposing from 
now on in this world, after this war, to apply 
the scientific method to being human and to 
ourselves, and not merely to bugs, acids and 
machines. The moment we do this we know 
we shall begin to get as good results in the 
science of being human as we do in the other 
sciences. 



The Creed of the Salesmen 199 

The scientific method of being human and 
of making human nature work is the science 
of attention-engineering and of advertising — 
the implacable process, by natural law, of get- 
ting the attention and touching the imagina- 
tion of men. 

• • • • • 

There are days when I feel, with this idea 
of a World Department, or of international 
advertising as a substitute for war, as if it 
invented the next five hundred years! 

If what I am trying to say about attention- 
engineering in these pages, about the more 
or less approximately exact science of making 
history happen the way we want it to happen, 
is welcomed by the American people within 
the next few months, if the invention I have 
in mind is adopted and introduced by the 
American Government as America's invention 
for ending the war and bringing Germany to 
terms and reconstructing a world, any kind of 
next five hundred years the world wants can 
be ordered and can be had, and we will at 
once proceed to carry out our national and 
international arrangements for having the next 



200 The Air-Line to Liberty 

five hundred years delivered to us in a row 
approximately as we want them and propose 
to have them. 

I believe that we are going to give our ideas 
for the Germans to Germany, that we are 
going to snow down ideas for Germans on 
Germans, instead of getting up every morn- 
ing as we do now from Maine to California 
in America and wading about knee-deep in 
our ideas for Germany ourselves. 

I prophesy a school of prophets, of trained 
experts in the science of changing men's 
minds. 

I believe we are coming together socially 
through men who can express either in words 
or actions contagious or commanding ideas, 
the salesmen of great beliefs. 

I believe that just as we have hundreds of 
thousands of salesmen for material products, 
who are studying the salesmanship of material 
products, we will have a hundred thousand 
men in America studying human nature, to 
protect and get control not only of what men 
make out of iron and wood and cotton and 
cloth, but what they make out of themselves. 



The Creed of the Salesmen 201 

I believe that modern life is evolving on the 
law of psychology that all power turns in the 
power of attracting and holding attention. It 
is a new profession we face, a profession of 
professions, the profession of changing men's 
minds. We take the word prophet seriously 
once more in the present crisis of the world. 
With our faces haggard with war, we master 
the weapons of the spirit. 



THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN 
AMERICA 

Chapter I 

THE KAISER IS LOOKING 

GERMANY is acting in our modern life 
as the Executioner of the sin and ineffi- 
ciency of free peoples. 

Germany gloats with her axe in her hand. 
The blow has fallen. "See Democracy!" Ger- 
many cries. "Oh, see Democracy now! run- 
ning around like a hen with her head off!" 
"See how Democracy cannot collect its wits!" 
Germany says. 

Germany is amused with us while murder- 
ing us. 

Looking from behind her mailed fist, Ger- 
many watches — one day, then one more day, 

20J 



204 The Air-Line to Liberty 

the people governing themselves. Every 
night she goes to bed gleeful over some new 
mind-wandering, soul-wobbling, strong, inno- 
cent, majestic stupidity of crowds. 

The way Russia looks to us we look to Ger- 
many. 

At the very best, to the higher type of Ger- 
man, Democracy is a great tragic Samson to- 
day, with his eyes out, standing by the pillar 
before he pulls down the world around a 
Kaiser's head. 

• . • • . 

Democracy is essentially a religious institu- 
tion and without religion, that is, without ad- 
vertising. Without the advertising of high 
desires and of great personalities to the people 
and the advertising of the people to one an- 
other, only a fool can hope to believe in it. 
Nearly all the things the Germans say against 
democracy are true — as long as democracy 
tries to exist without advertising. 

It is all bombast, vagueness and lying — 
what we believe in America about democracy, 
fraternity and liberty — unless democracy, fra- 
ternity and liberty advertise. I agree with the 



The Kaiser is Looking 205 

Germans, that democracy, liberty and fra- 
ternity are wistful and anaemic institutions, 
that they are too good for human nature un- 
less they are immediately and masterfully ad- 
vertised. 

Liberty, fraternity and democracy are new 
inventions for general use by millions of peo- 
ple. They have not been introduced yet. 
They have not been tried. They are water- 
colors. They have been sketched out. But 
until they have been worked out, they are bet- 
ter for schoolgirls and politicians than for men. 

We are fighting in this war for the suprem- 
acy of ideas as forces. 

Ideas as forces will not take the place of 
material things as forces unless they advertise 
as well, as skilfully and conclusively as ma- 
terial things do and as material men do. Ideas 
are not finished and are not expressed and do 
not exist until they are organized in spiritual 
armies, outface irrational things, grapple with 
irrational men and rule the world. From the 
point of view of organizing ideas in propor- 
tion to our education, America is worse than 
Russia. 



206 The Air-Line to Liberty 

They have in Russia anarchy in material 
things and in machinery. Russia's legs and 
arms have locomotor ataxia. But in America 
we have anarchy in what we see. We are roll- 
ing our eyes. What is worse for America and 
more dangerous for the world, we are rolling 
our eyes piously. 

How can we stop in this war rolling our 
eyes piously? How are we going to prove to 
Germany that we are not what she thinks and 
what she says we are, that our ideals are not 
water-colors for schoolgirls and politicians? 

By making the ideals work. 

By organizing attention. 

By organizing by national action, the vision 
and the wills of the people. 



Chapter II 207 

THE PRESIDENT IS LOOKING 

THE only thing on which national atten- 
tion is organized, and on which all 
Americans stand man to man and shoulder 
to shoulder, is our first advertisement to 
Germany — We can whip you with our guns. 
As to the other two advertisements for Ger- 
many — We can whip you with our souls, and what 
we propose for the world after some big, 
vague, generalized, pompous victory is won, 
America as it seems to me is bewilderingly 
at a loss. 

If the average citizen of America were to 
act just as he feels underneath during this 
war from day to day we would begin to see 
to-morrow morning in the Lost and Found 
columns of our newspapers from Maine to 
California advertisements like this: 

LOST AND FOUND 

"LOST! Somewhere near the great Four Corners of 
the world, on or about Sunday, August 2, 1914, my Na- 
tive Country — America. Any person who knows where 
America is, or who has seen America or anything that 
looks like America anywhere since above date, will please 



208 The Air-Line to Liberty 

report to Woodrow Wilson, the White House, Wash- 
ington, D. C, or to William Hohenzollern, Potsdam, 
Germany, at earliest possible moment. John Doe." 

President Wilson, in this first year of his 
new administration, is taking up the most stu- 
pendous task that History has ever thrown — 
almost as if she were in despair — at the feet 
of one man. Daily as he sits at his desk he 
faces a thousand years — for us and for the 
world. There are millions of men in America 
and in all nations who are hoping that in a 
crisis like the present one, so great as almost 
to drive a man — even a lesser man — into great- 
ness, our President is going to prove to be a 
great President. But he cannot be a great 
President all alone, and at present our Presi- 
dent is perhaps the loneliest President 
America ever had. I think he must be espe- 
cially lonely now with the people when he 
sees — with all the eagerness to which he has 
brought them — how little they see ahead. 
And yet for the moment, why is it I was 
obliged for months to watch my country wait- 
ing week after week, morning after morning, 
to be driven into the war on a technicality, or 



The President is Looking 209 

to be kept out of the war on a rule or prece- 
dent, or a piece of moral machinery or inter- 
national law, instead of being eager and full 
of some new constructive desire of her own, 
which made her run with vision to the rescue 
of the future of the world? We are being 
more spirited now, of course, but at our best 
we are only being spirited in a kind of glori- 
ous hand-to-mouth way. We are spirited 
about stopping Germany, but as a mass or a 
people we are not showing the spirit in a grim, 
passionate vision about what America wants 
to do with Germany or wants to do for the 
world when Germany is stopped. 

And what America wants to do when Ger- 
many is stopped is all that this war is about, 
is what the seventeen billion dollars are for 
and the flocks of young men's faces flashing 
past to die. Why is it one does not see any 
one in America, at least hardly any one except 
the President, going to the top of the Hill and 
looking off? 



210 Chapter III 

NATIONS WAIT 

THE present moment is our only moment 
to consider the question which will haunt 
our history for a thousand years — the question 
of what we mean by going into this war. 

The force of an action consists in two parts. 
There is the action itself and there is what 
people mean by the action. About one-tenth 
of the effectiveness of a war is the fighting in 
it. About nine-tenths of what a war does and 
about ninety-nine hundredths of its efficiency 
while it is doing it and after it is through 
doing it, is what people mean by it. 

We may have hell if we have war r and we 
may have hell if we have peace. 

But if we have no vision for what we do, 
we have hell anyway. 

We will be the people hell is made of. 

The first three inches of our vision for going 
into the war is this: 

A crazed and desperate nation is running 
wild with firearms up and down the street of 
the world, and America as a great pacific 
nation, as an ordinary decent citizen-nation is 



Nations Wait 21 1 

coming to the rescue of order and becoming 
an extemporized part of the Police Force of 
the world. 

We do not believe in force and we do not 
commit ourselves to force, and in the same 
thought and in the same breath we are getting 
ready to visualize and organize our nation's 
plan never to need to use force again; but in 
the meantime as we would do with those we 
pity and with those we love when they are 
running insane in the streets, we use force — 
we answer our hurry-call to help the over- 
whelmed Police. 

But this is merely a Policeman vision — a 
vision three inches ahead, for stopping Ger- 
mans. What is our constructive vision for the 
world and America? 

We will advertise to ourselves, get our own 
attention and find out. We will discover 
America in America. 

When America has been discovered in 
America it will be discovered in Europe. 
They are looking for America now. Four 
hundred years ago Europe sent over one man 
to try to discover America. Now every day, 



212 The Air-Line to Liberty 

every new morning, every new night, in 
twenty spent and desperate nations, millions 
of spent and desperate men are looking toward 
the west — trying to discover America. 



Chapter IV 213 

THE HUNDRED MILLIONTH OF A MAN 

A MAN is only a hundred millionth of 
himself without a hundred million men 
to help. 

If I were a colossal being capable of lift- 
ing around continents and tucking them in 
on a planet just where I thought best, and 
capable of arranging them when I had once 
put them in place, in any way I liked, and if 
God were then to place in my hand, like jack- 
straws, a hundred thousand pieces of ready- 
made railway track each a mile long; and if 
I then took my hundred thousand pieces of 
railway track and tossed them way up above 
the air across America and let each mile of 
railway come fluttering down to be a mile of 
railway all by itself just where it happened 
to light, I would be doing what this nation is 
doing to-day in laying out the purposes and 
ideals of its national life and in determining 
its vision and its will upon the earth. 

America is streaked all over with little na- 
tional ideals in one-mile lengths and we shall 
never come to ourselves and be a grown-up 



214 The Air-Line to Liberty 

nation in the world until we piece our one- 
mile ideals together, swing across our country 
in a few great simple trunk lines of purpose 
of vision and of will, face our destiny with one 
long deep look together and begin to live. 
Without a plain clear-cut idea of what this 
country is for and where it is going and of 
what it is to do among the nations, the time 
is soon at hand when America is going to be 
felt in history by the livelier, more spiritual 
nations as she is felt already by many of them 
to-day, as some vague unwaked anonymous 
stupid placid bigness sogging back on the fate 
of the world. We have everything. We can 
do everything. We are not lacking in either 
visions or in powers. We have a kind of reck- 
less, almost foolish abundance of all the ele- 
ments a nation needs to be great, but because 
we do not take a few days off from heaping up 
other things to heap up attention to what we 
want and to focus our vision on where we are 
going, we are merely a big nation to-day, big 
with that same old vague windy bigness for 
which we are known and smiled at through 
all the earth. 



The Hundred Millionth of a Man 215 

And now that it has come to pass that for 
the first time in history the other nations of 
the earth instead of smiling at us, are looking 
at us seriously and almost desperately and now 
that in their death struggle for the liberty we 
have a statue of — the liberty we have orations 
on and blow up firecrackers to — they turn at 
last sublime, tragic, and full of wonder and 
fear to us as the one great free people that 
could hope to save the remnant of their world, 
they find we are not ready. 

If America had seriously been trying for 
years to have a vision of her place in the world 
and had failed, I would be discouraged. It is 
because she has not tried and because she has 
not failed that the stupendous chance she now 
has to lift herself up out of her dissatisfaction 
with her own people, and her loneliness with 
other peoples is presented to her. 

It is not because we are really without ideals 
in America but because our ideals are with- 
out junctions that we are so vague and slow 
and disappointing to the world and to our- 
selves. 



2i 6 The Air-Line to Liberty 

If one would take a one-mile piece of the 
New Haven Railway — the busiest mile near 
New York — and suddenly jerk it up with all 
its trains and engines on it and drop it down 
in the woods of Aroostook County, Maine, the 
one-mile piece of railway would feel in Aroos- 
took County, Maine, the way an idealist or a 
man with a vision feels about his ideals in 
America. 

Nearly every man of us in this country for 
three years has been feeling his ideals for his 
country tugging at his heart strings and nag- 
ging at his mind day after day. Day after day 
he looks about at the other men in the country 
and wonders why, if they have ideals, they are 
not making the country do something with 
them. He falls into despair about the ideals 
of other people. They fall into despair about 
his. 

The reason that Americans are discouraged 
about America and about Democracy, is that 
each American has his own lonely one-mile 
piece of a great ideal. 

One-mile pieces of a great ideal would dis- 
courage anybody. 



The Hundred Millionth of a Man 217 

I have seen that when each man in Amer- 
ica begins seeing his own little one-mile ideal 
as a part of a three-thousand mile stretch of 
ideals, he will find himself a new man in a 
new country. Almost magically, almost the 
first moment some one flashes our visions to- 
gether and connects up the trunk lines of our 
souls each man of us will be a new man in a 
new country. 

The next thing our nation has to do is to 
organize national attention — make an Atten- 
tion Trust for the people — build trunk lines 
for our desires, great terminals for our souls 
— organize prophecy and vision in the way 
we have organized kerosene, transportation 
and harvesting machines. 

The American people are making a sorry 
showing toward Europe because our leaders 
in religion, literature and affairs are present- 
ing to us no trunk lines of vision on which to 
mobilize the daily lives of our people, because 
no Union Pacific has ever been designed or 
even proposed to carry the souls of the people 
to their destinations as it now carries their 
freight. 



218 The Air -Line to Liberty 

If America as the one great nation not 
fiercely exhausted by the war will see to it that 
she has a plan ready to make what the war 
accomplishes last forever, America will be 
doing the one thing that Lord Grey and Lord 
Rosebery and other Englishmen have said 
the heart of the world expects from her. If 
she devotes herself to welding her faith, to 
focusing her vision, to having a plan ready, 
America at the end of this war instead of be- 
ing the most lonely nation, will have made 
herself not only the most understood, the most 
eagerly welcomed, but the most necessary of 
all nations to the other nations weary and 
dazed and coming out of battle. 

Our battle in America now is to fight our 
way through to a vision — to draw up our pro- 
visional candidate-vision for a new world and 
make ourselves ready to render as great a 
service in this new world as England, Russia 
and France have rendered in getting rid of 
the old one. 

The vision of saving the world by ending 
the war has been and is being concentrated 



The Hundred Millionth of a Man 219 

upon by The Allies. We all have been asked 
to fall in. The vision of what can be done 
after the war is over — the vision of saving the 
world by peace and by establishing peace — is 
thrust upon us to create. 

To every man in America the cry of his 
country in behalf of the world goes out to- 
day. The country is almost calling for a draft 
of vision — a conscription of each man's soul 
that it shall gather his vision around him, 
clear his eyes before him, make a way for his 
people. 

I have seen that we will be a nation of 
prophets. We will spend our days — thousands 
of us a day from now on, in seeing the world 
straight and in seeing the world whole. We 
will have a World Department which will 
break us away from our little indifferences, 
from our little selfish fears, stop our hemming 
and hawing and yearning — swing us off from 
our little separate back-villages of belief, 
make us flock together, force us to come out 
into the open, look in each other's eyes, shape 
our vision as a whole people of a whole world, 
weld our passions together and lay down in 



220 The Air-Line to Liberty 

the sight of all the trunk lines of our vision 
and our hope. 

After all when one thinks of it, it is a stu- 
pendous thing that the breathless, righting, 
fiercely preoccupied nations bent down to 
their work, want from us and that they must 
have from us. 

For to them America has been free. She 
has not been until the other day stripped and 
in the hold and manning the guns. She has 
been alone, free-hearted, serene, up under the 
sky, out in the cool night . . . America has 
been the Deck Watch on the Ship, looking 
ahead! 

We must bring with us, now that we come 
to them, our vision. 



Chapter V 221 

THE NATION TAKES A HUNDRED MILLION 
LOOK 

ATTENTION in America, the attention 
of the people, is divided off into many 
huge national private parks or attention-pre- 
serves. The Saturday Evening Post has one 
attention-preserve. There are ten million 
people whose attention belongs to the Curtis 
Publishing Company. Mr. Collier has an- 
other attention-preserve. Mr. Hearst has an- 
other. And there are all the others. 

I was asking a journalist in New York, the 
other day, about the best way to get the idea 
in this book before all the newspapers and 
magazines of the country where it could have 
national discussion and reach all the people in 
America and reach them at once. 

He thought that if I put the idea in a book 
— a quick emergency book, and published it, 
a book would prove perhaps to be general 
public ground — a kind of Common of Atten- 
tion and would stand so far as the magazines 
were concerned a better chance of general dis- 
cussion before the people, but he thought that 



222 The Air-Line to Liberty 

it might be a little dangerous, if I wanted uni- 
versal attention to my belief, to have it appear 
in any particular magazine or to let it be iden- 
tified with any particular attention-preserve. 

Probably it was unfair, but the question he 
put to me was a very natural one. "If you 

let it appear in the Magazine will the 

— Magazine have anything to do with 

it, or notice it?" There are a great many ex- 
ceptions no doubt, but there is enough truth 
in it to call it a good average truth — a truth 
America will have to face — that if an idea of 
saving the country appears in one attention- 
preserve in this country, the other preserves 
will not seem to care very much, some of them, 
suddenly, whether the country is saved or not. 
They will hope it can be saved in some other 
way. 

If this is not true, and I am not ready to 
admit that in the present crisis it is true, every 
American can think of something like it that 
is. 

The evening papers in the city of if 

they would unite to deliver their papers to 
subscribers in all parts of the city would save 



Nation Takes Hundred Million Look 223 

a million a year, but they are too American 
to pull themselves together, and do it. They 
have been trying to plaintively for years. 
Sometimes one paper and sometimes another, 
always slips out at the last minute. To say 
nothing of organizing to distribute their ideas 
and make their ideas express and save a na- 
tion, the papers cannot organize to distribute 
the wood pulp they are printed on. One need 
not multiply instances. There are hundreds 
of thousands known to us. They make one 
feel that unless some powerful national ar- 
rangement is made for team-work-attention 
in America, we are going to have a very long 
and desperate struggle to get American at- 
tention organized and American vision fo- 
cused to subdue Germany and save the world. 
What America is looking for now and 
wants now is a John D. Rockefeller of at- 
tention. As John D. Rockefeller organized oil 
for America some one will have to organize 
attention for America. Organizing by the 
people and for the people, to get the attention 
of the people is the one way now left open to 
us if we are going to hope in America to com- 



224 The Air-Line to Liberty 

pete with a nation which organizes attention 
like Germany. 

The only way we can make democracy 
work from now on — make it intelligent, self- 
confident and masterful — is to proceed to ar- 
range in it as rapidly as possible three Atten- 
tion Trusts — one for the people's getting the 
attention of the Government, one for the Gov- 
ernment's getting the attention of the people 
and one for America's getting the attention of 
other nations. The Secretary of our World 
Department (who ought to be made one of the 
important members of the cabinet) should 
have three under-secretaries, or attention-engi- 
neers, who would operate in behalf of the lib- 
erty and the power of a great, free people, 
these three great attention-machines, a ma- 
chine for making the Government listen, a 
machine for making the people listen, and a 
machine for holding the attention of a world. 



VI 
MAKING DEMOCRACY WORK 

Chapter I 

MOBILIZING NEWSPAPERS 

I 

Rapid Transit Facilities 

THERE are three courses for a democracy, 
to-day. 
It can take its choice. 

First: we will make it more efficient than 
autocracy. 

Or Second, we will drive autocracy by force 
out of competiton with democracy and make 
the world safe for democracies to be as in- 
efficient as they like. We will take the ground 
that on a basis of sheer efficiency, democracy 
cannot compete with autocracy at all, that de- 
mocracy is by its nature and destiny a school, 

225 



226 The Air-Line to Liberty 

that government by, for and of the people 
must be like a George Junior Republic — a 
kind of play-government run by children and 
pupils, which is engaged half in doing what 
governments are supposed to do and half in 
teaching people how to do it. 

Or Third, we can steer a middle course. 

I believe America should take the first 
course. 

All a democracy has to do to be as efficient 
as an autocracy for people, as an autocracy is 
for the people to recognize the principle of 
employing authorities and experts. We can- 
not do this all at once. We will choose the 
fields of action in which we will as voters 
and citizens delegate and hand over our au- 
thority to experts, to be employed for us as 
they see fit, and we will select other fields to 
be run by amateurs. 

I would like to begin with what a de- 
mocracy can do — by mobilizing its news- 
papers. 

The newspapers are the spiritual railroads 
of the country. 



Rapid Transit Facilities 227 

The only reason that the Government (on 
the same almost universally accepted princi- 
ple) has not taken over rapid transit between 
ideas, for defense of the nation, in the same 
way that it has taken over gasoline, sugar, 
iron, coal and hogs, is that the American peo- 
ple (including the editors of many news- 
papers) do not see that the democracy and 
the defense of democracy depends as much 
upon mobilizing what America sees to do, 
as it does upon mobilizing what America 
sees to eat. 

It takes brains and the mobilizing of 
brains as well as sugar and hogs — to defeat 
an enemy like the Germans. 

If we have rapid transit in this country for 
sugar and hogs, and no brains can get through 
from one part of the country to another, 
be mobilized and massed in the nick of time 
in each crisis against the brains of Germany, 
we are going to lose the fight. 

Unless the newspapers or spiritual railroads 
of America make very swift and conclusive 
arrangements among themselves, for the rapid 
transit of ideas, inventions, of the enthusiasms 



228 The Air-Line to Liberty 

of the people from one part of the country to 
another so that the whole country can act at 
once, the Government will soon have to take 
the newspapers over in the same way and for 
precisely the same reasons — the same abso- 
lutely inescapable reasons, that they have 
taken over — with the enthusiastic consent of 
nearly all Americans, the country's railroads 
for sugar and coal. 

People are tired of getting their sugar, two 
pounds at a time and their coal by the bagful, 
and they have seen how much they want sugar 
and coal. 

What Americans needed to be told about 
the value of sugar and coal and hogs in this 
crisis, was told to everybody especially, one at 
at time, in their own cellars and kitchens and 
was told all at once, and the incredible revolu- 
tion for America, of having its fifty thousand 
miles of railway all taken over in a few min- 
utes, with all of the people looking on and 
cheering, took place without a ripple. 

Three hundred years were crowded into 
three days. 

The same is going to happen to the news- 



Rapid Transit Facilities 229 

papers except that the editors of the country, 
unlike the presidents of the railroads with 
their stockholders hanging like millstones 
around their necks, are going to get together 
as I firmly believe and are going to organ- 
ize the rapid transit of ideas for America 
themselves, mobilizing the spiritual enthusi- 
asms, the brains, the shrewdness and the 
love of the republic — the hope, wrath and 
expectation and religion of the people, front 
them up, mass them, and hurl them into the 
three advertisements that every day — day by 
day — we are hurling against Germany — "We 
Can Whip You with Our Guns, We Can Whip You 
With Our Souls, and Here is a Substitute for War 
That Will Make You Stop This One." 

All the newspapers have to do, is to save 
the Government the trouble. 

If the Government takes over the news- 
papers of this country it will do it because it 
sees what can be done with newspapers in 
making the country impregnable and uncon- 
querable, better than the newspapers do. 

The Government will do it because it sees 
that editing a newspaper in a time of war is 



230 The Air-Line to Liberty 

practically a greater, more noble and more 
powerful profession than editors do. 

The editors of the spiritual railroads of the 
country will do what the railroad presidents 
would have done ten years ago, if they had 
had a good reminder of how important they 
and their railroads are, and would have done 
much better probably than the Government in 
a moment of haste and desperate need can do 
it now. 

The spiritual railroads of the country in- 
stead of waiting to have a Government Head 
appointed to run them as one railroad, will 
soon find themselves getting together if they 
are not already doing so, to embrace their op- 
portunity themselves to mobilize the ideas of 
America. 

They will offer to cooperate with such a 
World Department as I have outlined — and 
begin to select the men to operate it. Every- 
body would rather have them. Self-control 
is a higher and more effectual form of power 
and interests and will utilize men of a higher 
and more masterful genius, than government 
control. 



Junctions 231 

The editors of the country will probably 
prefer to get together, organize and select the 
best man they have to the Government World 
Department to act as General Passenger and 
Freight Agent, or as Superintendent of Motor 
Power for Ideas in America. 

As Traffic Manager of the souls of a hun- 
dred million people, he will mass the inven- 
tiveness and individuality of their thinking 
into the world's mightiest weapon, into a 
massive colossal, spiritual and intellectual en- 
gine or heart. The heart shall be heard beat- 
ing around the world, and every throb shall 
be heard in Germany. 

2 

Junctions 

As long as America has a mere marrow or 
mush of publicity instead of a spinal column 
of publicity America will have to pick out 
second-rate anaemic, morally-tired things to 
do. 

Any monarchy can whip us as long as we do 
not advertise ourselves to ourselves. The only 
way to have the world safe for democracy, is 



232 The Air-Line to Liberty 

to make a democracy that is safe for the world 
to have. 

A democracy suffering as ours is, from a 
chronic spinal meningitis of news, a democ- 
racy which is provided with no coherent 
backbone of things it makes all the people 
know, a democracy in which the daily press 
which is not seen as a matter of course lifting 
the nation along every day, is not safe. A de- 
mocracy which is not placing facts and visions 
out before its people daily where the people 
can go to work on them and keep going to 
work on them is not safe. 

A monarchy that controls publicity — a 
monarchy that governs a nation by daily 
touching the imagination of the people and 
daily invoking the enthusiasm and marshall- 
ing the team-work of its people is safer for the 
world than a democracy that does not. If 
such an autocracy has bad ideas they will soon 
show and soon work out, and it will come to 
smash. It will not wobble and potter along 
as we do. It will have the energy to die. 

Publicity control is the Nervous System of 
a nation. It pulls its soul and body together 



Junctions 233 

and makes a living, unconquerable, command- 
ing, hundred-million man-power personality 
of a nation. 

This is what is being done every day by our 
salesman of ideas. Nine million out of ten 
million dollars we spend a week in America on 
getting people to believe things, is spent on 
the people who believe the things already. 

The reason that material things are better 
run by business men than spiritual things are 
by so-called spiritual men is that men who 
handle material things are virile salesmen. 
. . . They are men with ideas — spend nearly 
their whole time in finding out who the peo- 
ple are who do not want the ideas and in get- 
ting them to want them. 

What our World Department will do with 
the ideas of our American newspapers, with 
the spiritual forces and spiritual products 
which make America what it is, will be to 
mass them, study out a campaign for them and 
sell them in Germany, make the Germans 
want them whether they happen to know 
whether they want them or not. 

When an editor sits down to write an edi- 



234 The Air-Line to Liberty 

torial he will have not only the inspiration of 
a hundred million people listening to him in 
New York, and ten thousand country editors 
listening and copying, but he will know he is 
being read, not casually by men here and there 
in Washington, but by the American World 
Department which, if it thinks best, will mo- 
bilize his editorials at once for Stuttgart, 
Potsdam, Dresden, and for the Imperial 
Headquarters at the front. 

While he is writing his editorial he will feel 
the editorial perhaps the moment the paper is 
out, being caught up by the wireless, being 
translated into German over night, being de- 
livered before the next night by airplane in 
Germany, being read by the General Staff at 
headquarters at the front, and by lamps in 
back parlors in Berlin. 

The World Department may make quicker 
time or slower time of course according to the 
nature of the exigency, the turn of affairs in 
peace or in war that may take place any min- 
ute. 



Way Stations 235 

3 
Way Stations 

What would anybody think of a man who 
believed in whole wheat bread if he got all 
the people who are already using it together 
into a church, into a kind of culinary church 
every Sunday, and told them all over again 
Sunday after Sunday about it and never said 
a word to people flocking by a hundred a min- 
ute in the street outside, who had never tasted 
whole wheat bread? 

But this is what newspapers and other lit- 
tle provinces and churches of opinion are do- 
ing every day. 

I have thought several times during this 
war that one of the first things I would do if 
I had time, would be to organize what might 
be called "The Wrong Subscriber Move- 
ment." 

This country could be saved and fronted up 
against a world in a very short time, if all 
the people in it could be organized and made 
after the right fashion, partly tact and partly 
patriotism, to read each other's papers. 

From the point of view of a nation's act- 



236 The Air-Line to Liberty 

ing, of its carrying out ideas with directness 
and power, nothing can be expected of it un- 
less it takes ideas as matters of life and death 
and advertises its ideas as matters of life and 
death. 

If one thinks of ideas accurately and in a 
matter-of-fact way as living things — as valu- 
able but more or less perishable goods, which 
must be disposed of to people, or wasted — if 
one treats ideas as seriously as bread in a jar 
or meat in a refrigerator or eggs which must 
be thrown away if people cannot be got to 
use them, one soon comes to see that our pre- 
vailing arrangements for expressing ideas in 
nations or our usual tepid arrangements for 
distributing and marketing ideas in nations 
and to nations, are reckless beyond belief. 

The fate of the world for the next five hun- 
dred years depends upon getting all of the 
people in America to reading, and reading as 
quickly as possible, the wrong papers — the 
papers that they think are published for other 
people. 

If all the people of America who read the 
paper they like, would suddenly begin to- 



Way Stations 237 

morrow reading the papers of the people who 
disagree with them, the country would soon 
be reeking with thinkers, with mixers, and 
with men who do things for a nation, and who 
know how to act together. 

This is one of the first things our World 
Department — when we have one, will attend 
to. 

It will pour the publics of one paper over 
into the public of the other papers and run the 
flood of the news and the reek of the people 
together. 

The people who do not know about whole 
wheat bread in ideas would soon all be eating 
it a little and trying to, and all busy liking it, 
or learning to like it. 



238 Chapter II 

MOBILIZING MAGAZINES 

THERE are not a few exceptions, and I do 
not wish to seem to lump a whole class 
of men struggling with enormous difficulties, 
together, but I would like to express in the 
present desperate need of our nation for pull- 
ing its mind and its soul together, and striking 
through into a keen, swift powerful national 
presence of mind, I would like to be permitted 
to say — if I may be tolerated and forgiven a 
moment, a frank word about the American 
magazines. 

I do not see how they can meet their part 
of the crisis, unless they think more of what 
they can do for the country and less of what 
they can do for themselves. They are already 
doing this of course and anybody can see some 
of them doing it. They are rising to a new 
motive and a new courage and they have got 
their chins a little higher than usual up over 
the counter they sell magazines on, but for 
the most part our magazines — with a national 
audience— addressing Seattle, New Orleans 
and Boston all in a breath, have an opportu- 



Mobilizing Magazines 239 

nity to bring the country to a massive focus 
that can not hope to be approached by any 
other of the human, spiritual resources of the 
country. 

I do not see how the magazines can rise to 
their opportunity unless they have more cour- 
age, and more personality and sense of lead- 
ership and think less of themselves and are less 
jealous of one another. 

I do not see quite why the people should 
take them seriously as a part of America's 
great weapon in the war or why any one should 
want to write for them as they are. 

I do not see how a magazine in a crisis 
of democracy like this can hope to be a great 
magazine unless it looks up to the people, and 
unless it expects in the present crisis, at least 
a greater degree of intelligence, insight, hope, 
common sense, and eagerness to understand 
and willingness to be gathered in and to help, 
than many of our magazines are manifesting 
now. 

I believe that if the editors of the magazines 
of America would expect twice as much of 
their subscribers, in certain directions they 



240 The Air -Line to Liberty 

would have twice as many of them. They 
would be sure to have twice as many of them 
if they stopped wheedling, if they got so inter- 
ested in what they were doing for the nation 
and for the people and for Europe that they 
forgot whether they had any subscribers or 
not. 

There is nothing that subscribers like bet- 
ter than being overlooked — that they like bet- 
ter than being looked past — at some great 
surging spectacle of the world. 

I believe that the editors of the magazines 
of America as a class, like the Presidents of 
railroads, and the makers of motors, are go- 
ing to break out before this war is over, into 
doing with American national ideas for 
America, what James J. Hill did with rail- 
roads. 

But I do not see how they can do it as long 
as they are representing the owners of the 
stock so much more than they are representing 
the country. 

Of course this is just a personal conviction 
which I am bringing to bear in a moment of 



Mobilizing Magazines 241 

desperate national need — and anybody can 
take it or leave it. 

From the point of view of how masterful 
magazines a whole people take can be, — at the 
present moment with marked exceptions mag- 
azine life is as watery and insipid and as lack- 
ing in tang and leadership as political life was 
fifteen years ago. Political life has been com- 
paratively rescued from nonentity and disre- 
pute because powerful personalities have ap- 
peared in it and ventilated it, and anybody 
can see that the more a man takes the liberty 
of being himself in American public life and 
of expecting people to let him be himself, the 
more people will follow him and the more 
practical and powerful a politician he be- 
comes. 

The politician who feels so superior to the 
people that he thinks he ought not to act as 
if people knew anything or as if people would 
put up with his acting as if he knew anything, 
is being delegated to back seats and to less 
prominent places in public affairs. The people 
are being represented more and more every 
day in political life by real men. And real men 



242 The Air-Line to Liberty 

who formerly kept aloof are considering poli- 
tics worth while. If some one would now pro- 
ceed to do for the editors of America what 
Mr. Roosevelt has done for the politicians — 
if some one would get up somewhere in this 
country, blow a breeze and a steam whistle 
through the editorial chairs and magazine of- 
fices as Mr. Roosevelt did through convention 
halls and legislatures, the magazines would 
soon begin to be seen filing in, in America, and 
taking the front place that belongs to them as 
one of the great, frank self-revelations, one of 
the stupendous self-defenses of a people. 
American magazines instead of being practi- 
cally ignored would be translated into all lan- 
guages, would be as familiar on German tables 
and in German libraries as they are now on 
ours. The Germans would be compelled to 
read the American magazines because the 
American magazines would authoritatively 
represent the people. As at the present mo- 
ment our magazines do not represent anybody, 
not even the editors, it is no wonder they are 
finding it hard to get people to read them even 
in English. 



Mobilizing Magazines 243 

The moment editors of this country will 
stop feeling secretly superior to their sub- 
scribers — will stop knuckling under to the 
editorial theory that people do not want their 
editors to be anybody in particular or to con- 
duct their magazines as if they were, or as if 
they dared to peep — magazines in America 
will begin to be taken seriously. The people 
keep having hopes of soon watching editors 
waking up and making a stir, but in the mean- 
time, with the millstone of the fear of their 
stockholders around their necks and the iron 
anklets of their subscribers around their feet 
from month to month and from year to year, 
the people stand and watch them yearning 
and diddering. 

It is one of the things that is going to come 
next through a huge object lesson of one cour- 
ageous magazine looming up for scared ones 
to see — this emancipation of the editors of the 
magazines. Through the emancipation of 
editorial personalities — men who in them- 
selves sum up and symbolize and express the 
people or types of the people — the final full- 
heartedness and candor and nobility, the gusto 



244 The Air-Line to Liberty 

and will of a free and great people shall be 
nationally expressed. 

Men who are afraid cannot express to Ger- 
many and England even the bare daily com- 
mon facts of American human nature and 
American life. Even an ocean cannot try to 
express itself on a faint little penny-whistle 
without being a little absurd. And no wistful 
yearning high tenor editor pouring out before 
the people (as any one can see) his one single 
beautiful longing for more subscribers can ex- 
press America or what America is like to, a 
world. 



Chapter III 245 

MOBILIZING AUTHORS AND "PROPHETS" 



What Prophets are hike 

PEOPLE who think they are not inter- 
ested in prophets will please begin skip- 
ping in this chapter after the next paragraph. 

The people who are not interested in 
prophets to-day are the very people of all 
others who, if a real live prophet were pointed 
out right next door to them, would be inter- 
ested in him the most. 

Many people flatter themselves they are 
not religious, who are. 

The fundamentally religious people in this 
world are the people who expect things, the 
people who expect shrewdly, who expect 
hard, who expect now and who expect to the 
point. 

The fundamentally irreligious people in 
this world (thousands of them in Prince Al- 
bert coats flocking to church this very morn- 
ing) expect no more of prophets than people 
did three thousand years ago. 



246 The Air-Line to Liberty 

Prophets may be vastly inferior men now- 
adays, and have a kind of plain look morally 
and religiously, but they can do more. 

With the invention of the scientific metho 
with expression-experiment and advertising- 
psychology, with the printing press to swing 
out into the world with, and with the wireless 
that makes all the world sit around the same 
breakfast table in the morning, a prophet be- 
comes or may become any minute an imme- 
diate absorbing personal interest — a man with 
a vision for a nation. The stock-markets of 
twenty nations watch him. 

And whether he is wrong or right. 

Kerensky, for instance or Hoover — anybody 
with a vision — a working vision for a hundred 
million people, and who is expressing it, is a 
prophet. 

It is mostly clothes that make people think 
they are not interested in prophets now. They 
think of them with their arms up, with sheets 
on, and with a beautiful gone look hovering 
about on ceilings in the Boston Public Library. 

People should drop all this and should 
think of Mr. Hoover, digging out events be- 



What Prophets Used to Like to Do 247 

fore our eyes, digging out hope, excavating 
out of the stolidity and listlessness of a hun- 
dred million people a new world. 

When I speak of prophets in this book, I 
mean Hoovers— men in all callings and of all 
types and all professions who by selecting 
things to do or by selecting things to say, 
change people's minds and right-about-face 
their lives— advertising men— Mr. Wilson, 
Mr. Franklin K. Lane, Mr. Ford, Mr. Van- 
derlip, Mr. Gompers. It must not be forgot- 
ten by any live man to-day, that a prophet 
may be— any minute now,— with sublime and 
friendly truth, spoken of as "Mr." 

Having duly said what I mean by the word 
prophet, I am not going to wince any longer 
or feel other people wincing in this book, 

when I use it. 

2 

What Prophets Used to Like to Do 

Taking history as a whole nobody ever 
seems to pay very much attention to what a 
prophet thinks. He has been thrown off into 
"Mere Literature" or into writing bibles for 
two reasons. First because he always skipped 



248 The Air-Line to Liberty 

the first twenty-five years of his truth, and 
second because he would never do team work 
with other prophets. 

Given a prophet who does not skip the first 
twenty-five years of his truth, and who has a 
kind of splendid fury for team work and all 
the pious discouraged notions people have 
about prophets not amounting to anything un- 
til after they are dead, go by. 

The best copy of advertising a nation that 
ever has been written was Isaiah's. It was so 
good that it advertised and has kept on adver- 
tising the Hebrew nation three thousand years. 
Isaiah keeps a nation that was never born, 
alive. 

I think it can be shown that Isaiah failed 
or rather did not succeed as an advertising 
statesman until thousands of years too late be- 
cause he was really contented as a prophet 
to be put off with posterity. Isaiah did not 
hope to make the people he was fronted up 
with believe him. He did not write as a scien- 
tist, as in our modern time he might have 
written. He did not write with the grim 
stern expectation of being believed by the peo- 



What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 249 

pie on the spot he would have liked to be be- 
lieved by. In a kind of glorious and beauti- 
ful way before their own eyes, he gave them 
up. 

And they stood by and watched him giv- 
ing them up. 

With the coming in of the scientific method, 
and with the discovery of the social spirit 
the more religious a prophet is to-day the 
more determined and particular he is about 
convincing people before his own eyes, and 
about the first twenty-five years of his truth. 

If Isaiah were in America to-day I believe 
he would not only believe in prophecy but he 
would be making the present war efficient by 
putting back of it the daily orderly progres- 
sive vision of a people. 

3 

What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 

I have been looking at James Montgomery 
Flagg's picture of Uncle Sam pointing at me 
everywhere saying or seeming to say "1 mean 
you! 



2^o The Air-Line to Liberty 

I wonder what Uncle Sam means when he 
addresses me in this way. 

I have been trying to find out what he 
means and what I can do. 

The main conclusion I have come to is this: 

I think that what Uncle Sam ought to have 
back of all that look of his at me and back 
of all that pointing at me, is an enlistment 
blank to hand to me to sign which I feel en- 
lists me and enlists the whole of me, which 
counts me in for the kind of man I am, — an 
enlistment blank that makes a demand upon 
me to do the kind of things that I have been 
trained to do for a country. 

Kreisler is a better shot with his violin than 
he is with his rifle, and when his country let 
him give up active service in the field and he 
came over to America and began playing hap- 
piness into the hearts of crowds of people and 
playing their money out of their pockets into 
Austria, he stood out suddenly in the battle 
field for Austria as a thousand men. I feel 
that if I am better at hitting my enemy in the 
mind than I am at hitting him in the stomach, 
the Government should send me an enlistment 



What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 2$ I 

blank that will let me enlist for hitting him in 
the mind. I ought to belong to a National 
Attention Corps and not be wavering about at 
attention all alone in the dark by myself. I 
have a right to directors and leaders and ef- 
fective action in an Attention Corps. I do 
not want my attention-work to be tolerated by 
my government. I want it organized and used 
as seriously as power to shoot is used. If my 
aim in getting a man to agree with me in his 
mind is more accurate and deadly and more 
trained than my aim ever was or ever will 
be at the outside of his head, if I have been 
getting ready for forty years to use this way 
of hitting a man or of aiming at a nation, I 
cannot help feeling that some arrangement 
ought to be made by our War Department, to 
let me enlist in the kind of fighting I know 
something about. A War Department should 
organize and mobilize all kinds of fighting a 
country can produce. 

If a man is a soldier in this country and 
gets his gun and learns to shoot, the Govern- 
ment keeps him from shooting in the air and 



252 



The Air-Line to Liberty 



instantly arranges to make every shot count. 

But as things stand — at least for the mo- 
ment, an author if he is ready to be mobilized 
for his country with his kind of explosive, is 
expected to walk around anywhere and look 
around anywhere and shoot alone. 

I do not imagine this is going to be true 
very long under our present administration, 
if our President feels himself backed up by 
Congress and by the country in what I con- 
ceive to be his own personal vision of what 
could be done in America by organizing the 
imagination and the will of the people. 

I have been thinking what could happen 
or be made to happen if a few authors with 
national convictions and national insights in 
sympathy with the President, could have con- 
fided to them the order and the emphasis in 
which the President wanted them expressed. 
At this present moment for instance probably 
a thousand authors in this country have eight 
or ten pamphlets or little quick books which 
they desire to write and apply to the national 
situation, but we are all in the air about them. 
Fifty other men may be writing them and we 



What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 253 

do not know which should come first and there 
is no existing system of pamphleteering rec- 
ognized and set in motion by the Government 
in which what we do, can at once be made to 
count. Which train of thought should have 
the right of way? 

Authors in America just now want a Traf- 
fic Officer. A Bureau of Interpretation and 
Vision is as much needed in connecting up the 
Government with the people as a Bureau of 
Information? 

If the Government arranges for pouring 
facts before the people, should it not arrange 
for their seeing the facts in their order and 
relation so that they can act on them? 

Out of a hundred million people ninety-nine 
million will have to have their imaginations 
touched about America as the imaginations of 
Germans are touched about Germany, before 
Americans can be efficient in the war. Ger- 
many is efficient and is all but whipping a 
world because the Government begins touch- 
ing the imaginations of Germans about Ger- 
many when they are babies. 

I get up every morning feeling the need 



254 The Air-Line to Liberty 

all over again as I read the papers and watch 
the scattered dabs our papers make at the at- 
tention of our people. . . . Boston. ... St. 
Louis. . . . Seattle. . . . New Orleans. . . . 
As I see it, a series of drives not only upon 
the attention but upon the imagination of the 
American people, with certain facts and cer- 
tain principles must be made before we can 
efficiently make a series of drives by air, sea 
and land on Germany. We must organize the 
vision of our people and put it back of our 
guns. We must organize their vision even to 
get the guns. 

The vision of a people can only be organ- 
ized by a series of repeated culminating 
drives upon the attention of the people. Pa- 
pers have only a piecemeal attention and 
books and bookstores are too slow and only a 
system of door to door pamphlets rapidly mo- 
bilized by the Government, and possibly car- 
ried up and down the streets to each man's 
house by voluntary canvassers, can establish 
a direct intimate authoritative connection be- 
tween the vision of the people and the actions 
and proposed actions of the Government. 



What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 255 

The details would be worked out in several 
of many ways as might seem best, but I believe 
that it can be proved in this war that the pam- 
phlet is the natural art-form for national emer- 
gency, for facing or producing revolutions and 
changing nations' minds. 

A government mobilized Milton once, and 
Kipling and Wells have been mobilized into 
definite books by England, but the thing I have 
in mind for America is that a Government 
which recognizes that it has an essentially re- 
ligious task in waking up a people should in- 
stitutionalize seeing and the see-er — should 
mobilize prophecy and vision of a nation as 
seriously as it does its guns. 

One does not want to make too much of the 
word seer. One would rather use a hyphen 
with it and call it see-er, but one cannot but 
feel that the see-er, too, should have an army 
the Government will let him belong to. 

Mr. Wilson has plenty of things for an 
Elijah to do just now in this war, for this 
country. Where there seems to be one Elijah 
or semi-Elijah, there would soon be a hun- 
dred if the Government was showing what 



256 The Air-Line to Liberty 

they could do, and was giving them positions 
in which to do them. With the coming in of 
the scientific spirit and the social spirit, and 
particularly with the advent of a Woodrow 
Wilson, the old Ahab-Elijah convention for 
governments and prophets has gone by. The 
real prophet is wanted to-day in America. 
The real prophet to-day sits on the Council 
of National Defense without anybody's think- 
ing he is a prophet at all, or he publishes 
Weekly Bulletins like Roger Babson which 
bankers have to read. And when he is an au- 
thor he wants to cooperate with his Govern- 
ment and express his Government instead of 
being treated by the Government in the pres- 
ent crisis of the nation — as a kind of literary 
Aurora Borealis. 

A series of planned progressive culminating 
assaults upon the vision and the wills of our 
people will have to be made and there is really 
no way that authors can do their share in 
making it, without the central cooperation of 
the Government. I have believed that the 
Government, the first moment it can get to it, 
is going to organize and operate in all sec- 



What Prophets Would Like to Do Now 257 

tions of the country large squads of pam- 
phleteers, who shall write what might be 
called door-bell pamphlets, which shall have 
the authority and unity of the Government 
back of them, and in which, as it were, the 
United States shall ring the doorbell every 
few days of every citizen in the land, sit down 
and talk with him by his fireside, confide to 
him what it is trying to do to-day, trying to 
do to-morrow, and ask him to understand and 
to help. 

The Government on a vast scale will or- 
ganize and centralize the weapons of the spirit 
as it has all other weapons. 

The Government will arrange to let the men 
who are in the business of touching the im- 
aginations of men and of kindling their ideals 
and desires, do team-work for the nation like 
other citizens. 

The best way to mobilize authors in pam- 
phlets and rapid-fire books, as it seems to me, 
would be to have it done as a branch-work, 
by the Government's World Department 
which I have been suggesting. 

There is reason to believe that with the 



258 The Air-Line to Liberty 

daily press in the state of anarchy and com- 
petition in which it now is, no better plan 
could be devised than this for the Govern- 
ment's securing promptly and handling a full 
free confidential control of the personal at- 
tention of all of the people. 

If the Government can deal daily in this 
direct way with the people and can get atten- 
tion-control, all the other controls it needs, 
— money, enthusiasm, prompt understanding 
of national moves, a magnificent national sin- 
gle-heartedness — will come of themselves. 

4 
A Hope Held Out for Authors 

When I have just been getting off what 
seems to me a platitude, some one always gets 
up in the country and tells me that I am being 
visionary, and when (in a book or some other 
hidden modest place) I have just caught my- 
self getting off something that seems to me 
visionary, some one gets up (in the Smart 
Set, or Vanity Fair, perhaps) and tells me I 
am platitudinous. 

I do not want what I have been saying about 



A Hope Held Out for Authors 259 

prophets dismissed, if it can be helped, in 
either of these ways. 

It does not seem to me it can be called 
visionary to advocate the use of prophets by 
a nation just now. What would be visionary 
for a nation, in a desperate time like this, 
would be for it to suppose that it could pos- 
sibly do what it wants to do, without them. 

Of course by prophets I mean men who are 
experts in getting attention — advertising men. 

The nations are fighting with each other 
because they cannot get each other's attention. 
The people in each nation are fighting with 
the people in their own nation about how to 
fight the other nations. 

Peace consists in knowing how to listen and 
make people listen. 

A hundred thousand drummers could de- 
fend America from our having another war 
with Germany better than a hundred thousand 
soldiers. A little regiment of a thousand 
newspaper men really mobilized to get Ger- 
mans to listen to Americans and Americans 
to listen to Germans would defend us a year 



260 The Air-Line to Liberty 

for what it costs us to run a dreadnought a 
day. 

If our War Department were to mobilize 
a little company of say a hundred authors and 
have them each aim a book a year at nations 
that think they think they want to fight us, and 
if our War Department were then to adver- 
tise for five million people to read their books 
until it got them — in the same way that Eng- 
land's War Department advertised for five 
million soldiers until it got them — and if the 
people of America were once to see this being 
done, and put in definite operation before their 
eyes, the whole question of national prepared- 
ness, of America's safety and America's self- 
respect would be put on a new basis. The 
bare announcement that a hundred authors 
were going out against German illusions about 
America and American illusions about Ger- 
many and that as much money was being spent 
by our Government per day in getting foreign 
people to look at our hundred authors' books 
as is now being spent per day in getting them 
to be afraid of our dreadnoughts . . . the 
bare announcement that our War Department 



A Hope Held Out for Authors 261 

was mobilizing and planning to mobilize ideas 
in this nation with precisely the same efficiency 
and same expense it has employed in mob- 
ilizing less powerful explosives, would put a 
new face in a week on our national talking 
and planning about permanent armament after 
the war. It is because people quite reason- 
ably want to see something being done that 
they have been betrayed into their present ap- 
pearance of helpless and grudging belief in 
big armament after the war. 

The moment their attention is got by the 
Government through advertising men, to what 
can be done by advertising men to provide a 
working substitute for armament, and the 
moment people see the advertising men doing 
at home the thing they talk about doing 
abroad, namely, getting people to listen, the 
American people will expect things of authors 
as seriously as I do. 

In a less serious time than this, it would not 
be modest for an author to stand hopefully as 
I am doing now with his explosives in his hand 
and suggest to a War Department how useful 
he could be to his country. Perhaps I can 



262 The Air-Line to Liberty 

make my point better by pointing out how 
much harm I could do to it without a War 
Department to tell me when and where to 
fire. Treitschke, by writing a book, recruited 
five million men in England and elsewhere 
and set them fighting his country to the death. 
The five million men, after hearing about 
Treitschke's book and about Treitschke's 
ideals for Germany, were willing to die to 
keep the book from coming true. Nietzsche's 
books exposed Germany to twenty nations and 
to a firing line two thousand miles long, of 
men who believed Nietzsche's advertisement 
of what Germans and Germany were like. 

How many million German lives would it 
have saved if the German General Staff could 
have thought of it in time or known enough 
to think of it in time and prevented Treitsch- 
ke's book from coming out, from slumber- 
ing on bookshelves like a fuse and then blow- 
ing up his country? 

I wish the people of my country and the 
authors of my country before this gigantic 
task of lifting and firing the imaginations of 
a world would take authors seriously. 



A Hope Held Out for Authors 263 

An author may be any minute for America, 
a very serious form of explosive unless the 
War Department keeps him, acting innocently 
and all alone, from going off in the wrong 
place or at the wrong time. 

Ideas have been making good all along in 
this war as explosives. They have raised all 
the money for the other kinds of explosives. 
I have seen that we are going to get ideas as 
explosives on our side in America and that 
we are going to use them as explosives on 
some colossal scale and in a highly organized 
way to defend us in America, from our en- 
emies, and from ourselves, and blast out for 
us a new world. 

I do not yield my ground in my belief in 
prophets because there is not a man reading 
this book who cannot give me the names of a 
hundred prophets who have been stoned in- 
stead of taking government positions, and who 
have never efficiently defended anybody from 
anything, and who have never even defended 
themselves. 

But it is mere history. 

It is not history we are facing now. We 



264 The Air-Line to Liberty 

face ourselves. We distinguish the new 
prophets and the old ones. Before Galileo 
and the birth of the scientific spirit, — in a day 
when prophets cannot get people's attention 
they are starved. But when as nowadays, they 
can get people's attention, and when they make 
people glad they have got it, people pay them 
for it. 

Before science came in and the spirit of 
applied knowledge, prophecy was a kind of 
rosy spray of truth. 

Truth is a hydrant now. 

Niagara Falls, instead of being a geographi- 
cal decoration and being looked at, lights the 
eyes of a hundred cities all night, carries five 
hundred thousand people home to supper and 
in a thousand miles of buildings on a million 
wheels turns the wills, hopes and desires of 
millions of men. 

In Niagara Falls God is turning a Turbine 
Wheel. 

That concentrated look in Uncle Sam's eyes, 
gazing at us out of all our streets, is the Twen- 
tieth-Century look on the face of the world. 
It is daily doing things to our arts, to our 



A Hope Held Out for Authors 265 

literature and to us — that look in Uncle Sam's 
eyes. Formerly we had literature. To-day 
we are in a transition stage and until we ar- 
rive somewhere we are having for the most 
part in America what might be called Liter- 
ature-To. We have invented a form of art- 
expression which in a rare degree looks a man 
in the eye between the words (like James 
Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam) and says 
while one stands transfixed on the sidewalk, 
"I mean you!" 

This is what has happened to prophecy since 
Isaiah. 

Isaiah did not look very much like James 
Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam, I imagine, 
in his sermons! 

I wish there were something more — a kind 
of exaltation in Uncle Sam's face when he 
asks me — when he asks us all. . . . 

I feel it is there, though. He keeps it in 
behind, to do things with. 

The Germans have scornfully called us a 
nation of shopkeepers and salesmen. 

All that America needs to do with this state- 



266 The Air-Line to Liberty 

ment is to take the scorn out of it, make being 
a salesman a new thing, use the genius and tem- 
per of salesmanship to advertise democracy, 
sell liberty to all nations, and drive the Ger- 
many that defies it off the face of the earth. 

Getting people to do things which they do 
not want to do and which we hope they will 
be glad we got them to do afterwards in our 
national temperament. 

We are not naturally (as they are in some of 
the older nations) political historians or states- 
men or artists. We are workers in wills and 
changers of people's minds and our main in- 
terest is in getting — without going to jail for 
it — what we want. 

This is the gift America must dedicate to 
the world, in dealing with Germany. 

The literature of a people if it is true and 
alive is a nobler and finer statement of their 
essential genius and of their typical ordinary 
men. 

I have written this chapter with a kind of 
jealousy and hope for the authors of my coun- 
try, that we may take our place with the other 
salesmen, that in the present first entrance of 



A Hope Held Out for Authors 267 

America into the literature and life and his- 
tory of Europe, we may take upon our lips the 
accents of our own people — that we the au- 
thors of America may prove ourselves true 
prophets, salesmen of liberty and hope to a 
world. 

Here's hoping we are going to have a World 
Department in America that prophets can 
work for and work with! 

A prophet can be a prophet in one place, a 
minute at a time, all alone but if we have a 
Government Machine for arranging it he can 
be a prophet the same minute, everywhere all 
the time. 



268 Chapter IV 

MOBILIZING GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS 



Conveniences for Being Allowed to be Original 

WITH a machine for getting a hun- 
dred million people to help, the 
American Government can conceive at home 
and carry through abroad a high-spirited, 
original world policy for ending the war and 
rebuilding the world. 

With advertising — a policy that a genius or 
seer of a hundred years might think of, 
could be adopted by America. We could act 
as from the point of view of history, a whole 
nation looking back or looking forward and 
being inspired. With advertising, the Gov- 
ernment could act as a great man would act 
and carry through great conceptions, visions 
that would fill a nation with a kind of singing- 
fighting. Without advertising, the Govern- 
ment will have to take comparatively the 
earliest, quickest, cheapest course the people 
will let it take, the course that takes the least 
for granted of American men. America, in- 



Conveniences for Being Original 269 

stead of announcing and adopting in behalf 
of the world a course that takes the most for 
granted, that takes for granted high-motived 
and high-powered men, will have to take the 
course anybody can think of that anybody can 
carry out and that a hundred million indiffer- 
ent, half-noticing people like without trying. 

One can see crossroads everywhere in busi- 
ness or politics where naturally a high grade 
mutual team-work course can be taken by 
mutual educating, and by mutual confessing 
and advertising, and a low grade course with 
people asleep or just as they are, without it. 

The best spring-board or momentum for a 
nation to plunge into world politics with is 
one hundred million people who have just 
changed their minds, who have been adver- 
tised into an inspiration. 

This nation cannot hope to bring as its offer- 
ing to the grave, older nations, its experience. 
Its only chance to serve them is its youth, its 
gusto and freshness and its possible original- 
ity. But a hundred million people are not 
going to be original and do an original thing 
all together without advertising. The orig- 



270 The Air-Line to Liberty 

inal men, the inventors of the futures of the 
nations — the men who could conceive and 
carry through an inspired programme, a vision 
a hundred years ahead, are not numerous. 
There may be ten thousand of them perhaps. 
If these ten thousand men were America, 
America could promptly and glibly proceed 
to act to-morrow like a nation-genius, but 
these ten thousand men are not America. 
There are ninety-nine million, nine hundred 
and ninety thousand other men that go with 
them that will have to be got to see the fate 
of the world hanging in the balance. Then 
they will go ahead and back them up. One 
hundred million people in a democracy can- 
not be original without advertising, without 
spending time and money on their originality. 
In an autocracy a million people can be origi- 
nal in a few days. All an original man has to 
do is to get the attention of the Kaiser. Sixty- 
six million people are then to be seen at once 
doing original things, like the drive through 
Belgium, poisonous gases and Lusitanias, all 
in a few days. 

The life-blood of originality in a nation 



Conveniences for Being Original 271 

turns on circulation or advertising. Progress 
and advertising (advertising might be called 
rapid-fire education) are synonyms. Adver- 
tising is radium. It will make people outdo 
themselves. It makes one man as a hundred 
thousand. First we advertise to see what the 
one man sees. The one man becomes a hun- 
dred thousand. Then we advertise to act and 
the one hundred million act as one man. 

We have never expected people to be orig- 
inal in vast crowds before. A hundred million 
people all being original together, all seeing 
and doing something inspiring and new to 
them, has not been possible because the heavy 
spiritual hydraulic machinery for pressing the 
originality out of great masses of human na- 
ture (the latent originality in all of us) has 
only been invented of late. The machinery 
of simultaneousness and everywhereness, for 
doing a thing everywhere, the wireless tele- 
graph, the movie, the telephone and the print- 
ing press and airship have only just begun to 
suggest what they can do. They make democ- 
racy possible. It was foolish expecting to 
have democracies in olden times, i. e., expect- 



272 The Air-Line to Liberty 

ing vast crowds to see and act together and 
millions of people in hundreds of places to 
express themselves to the world, when they 
could not even express themselves to one an- 
other. A nation is as snug and trim as a vil- 
lage now. If it has a government that keeps 
it articulated and advertised together — a gov- 
ernment that has a news-spinal column, and a 
great light in its eyes — there is not a Kaiser on 
earth but that would wither before it. 



Conveniences for Being Allowed to be Efficient 

The other day I made out a list of fifty men 
in whom I have been particularly interested 
in the past twenty years. 

I came on a curious fact. If I find myself 
especially interested in a lawyer, a doctor, an 
architect, a painter, or man in any profession, 
I find he is almost always sure sooner or later 
to be attacked by the rank and file of success- 
ful men in his profession. He is engaged in 
making his profession a new profession. I 
find that a good way for me to pick out the 
men that seem to me the most valuable to the 



Conveniences for Being Efficient 273 

country at large, is to look over a long row of 
a hundred men who are found fault with and 
pick out ten. I find I waste less time every 
year in looking over standardized persons and 
experts to find men of power. Nine unques- 
tioned experts out of ten are through learn- 
ing, and it is out of the questioned experts one 
must pick out the great men or the servants of 
the people. It seems to be the same with prac- 
tically every group. One saves time in look- 
ing for a man in a profession if one gathers 
together the outs or the half-outs. The best 
men are half-in and half-out of the professions 
to which they are supposed to belong. 

I have come on another fact. The men who 
have interested me have all been men who 
have had something, or who have been some- 
thing, that needed to be advertised. They 
have been inventions. They have attacked 
my imagination with what they could do, and 
with what could be done with them if people 
knew about them. They have made me want 
to have people know about them. 

The second or creative stage of a powerful 



274 The Air-Line to Liberty 

man or of anything a powerful man does, al- 
ways seems to involve advertising. 

One of these men in whom I have been in- 
terested in this way — in his earlier under- 
ground tubular days was our present Secre- 
tary of the Treasury and dictator of railways, 
Mr. William G. McAdoo. 

Having had all these pleasant advertising 
emotions about him and having duly recorded 
some of them in Crowds, I was a little taken 
aback the other day to find (as probably Mr. 
McAdoo was when he saw it in the paper) 
that he had said in objecting to the recom- 
mendations of the Advisory Board of the Na- 
tional Advertising Association, "The trouble 
is that the Government if it advertises at all 
will have to advertise in everything." 

That is just it. 

But this is a recommendation instead of an 
objection. 

All anybody can say who has watched Mr. 
McAdoo is that apparently good government 
officials in proportion as they are efficient, 
think of ideas and want to carry out for the 
people that are more original and more ad- 



Conveniences for Being Efficient 275 

vanced than the people would have themselves. 
In proportion as public men are efficient now- 
adays (Mr. AcAdoo's whole career tells us 
daily), they are trying to do things that can- 
not be done without educating the people who 
elect them to office, and without advertising to 
the people who are to help them carry them 
out. In proportion as a government is produc- 
tive in trying to do things too valuable to be 
thought of by people in general, in proportion 
as it is trying to enter into partnership with 
the people and get them to help, it must be an 
advertising government. A government that 
is not an advertising government cannot be 
said in any real sense to be a government at all. 
A government that objects to advertising be- 
cause, if it advertises in one thing it will have 
to advertise in all, better be kept from adver- 
tising. (It cannot be that Mr. McAdoo quite 
said what he is reported to have said.) Any 
advertising a government that says this, and 
means it, would do would be wrong and 
would waste the people's money. A govern- 
ment that can say a thing like this needs to 
have advertising advertised to it and needs to 



276 The Air -Line to Liberty 

be told what the fundamental principle of 
advertising is. Every Cabinet officer ought to 
be the head of what is practically an Adver- 
tising Department. Mr. McAdoo is. 

Advertising is based upon the fundamental 
nature of a new idea. Advertising and a new 
idea are inseparable. 

Nearly every business man has seen the 
proof of this. 

First an idea has to be invented. Having 
been invented it has to be advertised to get 
the money, and the people to invest in it. 
Then advertised so that some samples of it 
can be produced. Then advertised so that 
people will look at the samples and use the 
samples. 

Then advertising stops and dramatizing sets 
in. The idea begins busily (like a sewing 
machine) advertising itself. One advertises 
at certain stages and not others, to certain peo- 
ple and not others. All advertising is for 
with an idea is to start it dramatizing or ad- 
vertising itself. 

Advertising is limited to new ideas or new 
application of old ones. All intelligent ad- 



Conveniences for Being Efficient 277 

vertising, for a government or any one else in 
the long run, is self-supporting and creates 
value instead of spending it. 

All intelligent men spend ten hours a day 
in advertising, in getting somebody's attention. 
They are paid by the men whose attention they 
get, for getting it. People want to be adver- 
tised to. 

All new ideas and all ideals logically in- 
volve advertising or education. 

First, we advertise a new invention to get it 
produced and manufactured. 

Second, to get it used. 

In the third stage a new invention instead 
of advertising begins dramatizing. It demon- 
strates its value to people and speaks itself. 

A government does not need to advertise 
everything all the time. It moves on its ad- 
vertising to its new ideas. 

"The Government if it undertook to serve 
the people by advertising would have to treat 
all newspapers alike and could not use any 
discrimination" (or brains), says the New 
York Times. The Government in the person 



278 The Air -Line to Liberty 

of Mr. McAdoo says that the government can- 
not serve the people by advertising, because if 
it advertised it could not use any discrimina- 
tion (or brains) in determining what subjects 
to advertise. If one, it would have to adver- 
tise all, Mr. McAdoo is reported to have said. 
But I must take issue with Mr. McAdoo (as 
I think he would probably with himself). 

If democracy is not allowed to use its brains 
and be discriminating, why make the world 
safe for democracy? The more this planet is 
made safe for a government that cannot dis- 
criminate, the more dangerous it is going to 
be to live on it. The specific thing a people's 
government is for is to discriminate between 
the people. It is the one power in the land 
that represents all the people and that is in a 
position to discriminate in behalf of all of 
them. It is selected by all the people for the 
express purpose of taking advantage of its cen- 
tral, national and impartial position to do their 
discriminating for them. 

The Times and Mr. McAdoo are more dis- 
couraged about democracy than I am. 

Democracy is an invention for making it 



Conveniences for Being Efficient 279 

possible for crowds (for all practical pur- 
poses) to be discriminating. It is based on the 
idea that one hundred million people, by 
combining with, say ten thousand experts, can 
be as discriminating as they like. 

The National Chamber of Commerce met 
the other day and asked to have prices fixed 
by the Government. A hundred rival rail- 
roads have got together and practically asked 
the Government to run them for the people 
during the war. Twenty rival motor manu- 
facturers sat around a table in Washington the 
other day and threw all their trade secrets on 
the table for the Government and asked the 
Government to discriminate between them and 
between their trade secrets and take freely the 
ideas it could use best and quickest to make the 
Liberty motor. 

"Here is what I can do," every one comes 
saying to the Government to-day. "Take it or 
leave it," everybody is saying to the Govern- 
ment. "You alone are in the central position 
to serve all the people and be served by all 
the people." 

There is not one of us who in a national 



280 The Air-Line to Liberty 

crisis will not give his secrets and privileges 
and his gifts up to some central power that he 
knows will use them, and that he knows is in 
a position to use them, for the people. 

The more a people's Government adver- 
tises the more the people count in it. 



Chapter V 281 

MOBILIZING STATESMEN 



Letting a President be Reserved 

I WAS talking with a newspaper man a 
while ago about the custom newspaper 
men in Washington have had at times of see- 
ing the President twice a week. It is not so 
often now, I believe. 

I have often wondered what seeing the 
President in this way is like. 

I have never been quite willing to accept 
what has seemed to be the regular newspaper- 
ish point of view about the President's reserve. 

I have wondered what ordinary people like 
me or like The People would think of the 
President's reserve. If the people could be 
there concealed behind a curtain perhaps, 
watching the little ways the President has with 
the New York Sun or the New York Tribune 
or the Boston American — what would people 
think of the President? Is the President's re- 
lation to the papers really democratic or is it 
not? The idea touches one's imagination a 
little. 



282 The . Air-Line to Liberty 

The newspapers of America get together in 
a little crowd alone in the same room with the 
President of the United States and ask him 
questions. Chicago asks him a question. 
Then Boston speaks up, or perhaps New Or- 
leans. And so on. About seventy-five cities 
in this great nation in all are allowed to pop 
their heads in modestly in this way into the 
White House and are given a few respectful 
distant moments with the President of the 
United States in which to get him (if he can) 
to tell them things. 

At first sight this does not seem very demo- 
cratic. We are apt to like to think here in 
America, that our President is the servant of 
the people. We like to think of him as having 
his coat off and working hard for us, and as 
being very respectful when we come along to 
tell him how we want things done, or to ques- 
tion him about what he is doing. We do not 
like the idea — not at first sight, anyway, of 
being given a few little snippy minutes — by 
our National Hired Man, our First Work- 
man. We like to think we can have all the 
time we want and that the President will stand 



Letting a President be Reserved 283 

there modestly, respectfully, while we are by, 
busy of course and in his shirtsleeves, but his 
foot resting on his shovel gracefully, while we 
tell him what we want and while we ask him 
to explain to us what he is doing and why he 
is doing it and why he is not doing it in some 
other way, or what he is going to do next. 

That is the way it is apt to seem at first sight 
It does not seem to some of us quite demo- 
cratic. 

There are three great classes of people in 
America with regard to the question, "Is 
President Wilson's reserve a democratic insti- 
tution or is it not?" Some of us will say that 
President Wilson's reserve is not democratic, 
that publicity and candor are the very breath 
of democracy. There are others of us who 
say that President Wilson's reserve as we have 
seen it working, so far, on the whole, is the 
hope of the people. The best way a man can 
do who has to do his work daily in the constant 
watchful presence of men who are crowding 
the people out of things that belong to the peo- 
ple, is to lie low, keep still, get the things for 



284 The Air-Line to Liberty 

the people that belong to them, and talk after- 
wards. 

Suppose the President plants a fine, fat, 
promising, national acorn and a voter from 
Waco, Texas, comes along and says he does not 
trust the President on acorns, and says he 
wants the President to pull it up just for him 
to see how it is doing. Should he? Would 
this be democracy? 

President Wilson cannot run out of the 
White House and explain to everybody every 
day or so, just how it is that he is going to 
ferret out, discover, arrest, imprison, embar- 
rass, or throw out of business the men who are 
pocketing the people's money. The Presi- 
dent's special work is very largely one for the 
next few years, when American business men 
are passing through a period of moulting and 
are casting off their old skins and putting out 
their new moral feathers, of acting in behalf 
of the people as half nurse and half detective 
toward business. The President is largely oc- 
cupied in these present watchful years in 
catching burglars who are in his own house, 
and who are sitting as it were at his own tabic 



Letting a President be Reserved 285 

and who are supposed to be ready to jump up 
any minute and help him catch themselves. 
If a hundred men are all gathered together in 
a room discussing how they are going to catch 
certain burglars and the burglars are all in the 
room, joining in the discussion, the less discus- 
sion there is, the sooner the burglars can be 
caught. 

The plain every-day fact would seem to be 
that if President Wilson cannot get people to 
trust him enough to let him keep still, he 
would really have to give up his position. 

If a democracy is not secretive at the mo- 
ment sometimes, it is not efficient. 

This does not seem — not at first sound of it 
— to be exactly a democratic remark. Prob- 
ably if Mr. Woodrow Wilson of Princeton, 
New Jersey, had heard anybody make it four 
years ago, he would have told him it was not 
so. The last man to understand the way Presi- 
dent Wilson is acting to-day would have been 
Mr. Wilson himself four years ago. His idea 
was then — before his election — that he was 
going to tell everybody everything. He was 
going to keep everything all told up all the 



286 The Air-Line to Liberty 

time, every morning and every night. He 
thought that this was democracy. Mr. Wood- 
row Wilson would never have stood up, as I 
do now, for President Wilson. There are a 
great many of us who want to. We think we 
understand what happened to the President. 
We would like to see it happen to other pro- 
fessors. When Mr. Wilson stopped being a 
professor of democracy and became a Presi- 
dent, he grew very fast in a few days. He 
changed his mind. The moment he really 
buckled down to getting things for people, he 
found that the democracy he thought he be- 
lieved in could not get things for the people. 
He saw that the huge helter skelter candor we 
have in this country and that our public men 
think they have to have — what might be called 
a kind of crazy quilt, or spatterwork of pub- 
licity — could not be made to work. So he be- 
came suddenly the stillest person America has 
produced. So he became (if I may make 
bold) the National Mouse, and after eight 
years of having a Lion — and after four years 
with a beautiful, splendid, Newfoundland 
Dog — there are some of us who do not repre- 



Letting a President be Reserved 287 

sent newspapers in Washington and who have 
a kind of desperately hopeful feeling about 
really getting things for the people — who are 
glad. 

There are but three qualifications I venture 
to believe that the American people are going 
to make when they find out how secretiveness 
in a President works. First, they will want 
to feel that now and then by word or action 
he will make a clean breast of things. Sec- 
ond, they will want to feel that he is a good 
listener. Third, they will want to feel that 
this secretiveness the Nation has trusted him 
with will never be used for the President's 
personal or party ends. 

For the most part it is the people who still 
believe in spatter-work publicity who com- 
plain of the President's secretiveness. For the 
most part our people believe that what is 
called the President's secretiveness is merely a 
postponed confidence. The President has rea- 
son to feel that he has been granted by the 
people — for a time — permission not to do his 
thinking out loud. 



288 The Air-Line to Liberty 

When his idea is being conceived and before 
it is born — he keeps quiet about it. 

If a man really has something he is doing 
for the people, half of getting it done is the 
way it strikes the people first — and a very im- 
portant part of doing it is the way it is an- 
nounced. 

If a nation is looking forward anxiously to 
an heir to the throne — and it is announced that 
apparently there is going to be an heir, the 
nation keeps still and for quite a while, any- 
way, it is recognized as the Queen's affair. 

In the same way there is nothing unpatri- 
otic when an Idea is to be born in a democracy, 
to wait quietly and more or less trustfully until 
the person who is having it, has presented it. 

This is what one might call the biology of 
getting a thing done in a democracy. Silence 
in a President is one of the rights of the 
people. 

This is where a World Department could 
help. It would be able to get thousands of 
newspapers to help secure efficient and timely 
evidences for the people. 



VII 
FIGHTING TO A FINISH 

Chapter I 

FINDING THE RANGE 

BY fighting to a finish I mean gathering up 
in America seventy thousand locomo- 
tives, twenty-two thousand miles of solid 
freight cars, a thousand miles of passenger 
coaches and Pullmans, three hundred and 
ninety-one thousand miles of steel rails, and 
hurling them at the German people. 

This is what Mr. McAdoo is supposed to be 
doing all day every day. 

This is what America's World Department 
will do in the way of mobilizing the spiritual 
railroads of the country and presenting a solid- 
moving, massive, impenetrable, spiritual front 

a free inventive individual heaped-up moral 

289 



290 The Air-Line to Liberty 

energy, no nation like Germany can hope to 
withstand. 

Perhaps it will answer my purpose to quote 
for the moment from an entry in my journal : 

Mount Tom, , December, — . 

Three days ago (as I write these words) Halifax blew 
up, froze up and burned up all at once. 

What is it we see happening almost immediately all 
over the world in a breath, after it? 

We see Halifax getting so much attention in a fiercely 
busy, desperate fighting world, that it hardly knows which 
way to turn. Its advertising has got started and cannot 
stop. It is advertising to people now not to advertise it 
and more. The first thing we know it cries, "Four thou- 
sand people here are killed, dead or missing!" And it 
wants nurses, doctors and people to help. Then it sends 
out a cry to be relieved from too many nuises and doctors 
and people to help. It has nothing for them to eat. Now 
to-night it is telegraphing around the world, "Don't send 
us anything to eat or let any more people come to eat it! 
Send us cooks to entertain our tourists who have come to 
look at our misery, take photographs of us and make our 
sorrow into magazine articles." 

Halifax has the world's attention in fifty 
words. One night-letter sent in a minute 
makes people explode, all over a planet, into 
one Thought. 



Finding the Range 291 

I caught myself the other day writing some- 
thing like this 

I wish I could touch the Listening Button 
in a man. 

I wish I could look over the index or table 
of contents of a man's mind, choose a subject 
I like and touch his talking button. 

I wish I could touch a button in a man — a 
button he didn't know he had, and which he 
wouldn't know I had touched — which would 
shut him like a book. 

I wish I could be deaf at will and look as 
if I couldn't help it — have these sudden un- 
accountable attacks of deafness that people 
would know I was liable to, like asthma, at 
certain times of day. 

After I had written these words (which had 
been subconsciously called up I suppose by 
having been to an afternoon tea the day be- 
fore), I was reading them over a minute be- 
fore writing this chapter and it suddenly came 
over me that while I probably cannot get a 
Listening Button or Talking Button arranged 
and set up in any of the people I know or meet 
at afternoon teas, National Listening Buttons 



292 The Air-Line to Liberty 

and Talking Buttons could be arranged for 
and installed and operated by our World De- 
partment at Washington just as well as not. 

I do not mean by this an authoritative Cen- 
sor Department that would make people keep 
still — nor do I mean a kind of National School 
Teacher Pointer which would tell editors and 
great magazines when they could talk. The 
Department would operate rather in the hand 
of a man with a genius for it — as a kind of 
Hinting Works. It would be a National Mo- 
tive Power Station, which would depend for 
its success, not upon its authority but upon its 
suggestiveness and its power to precipitate 
team-work. 

If America organized attention, it could 
pool important national subjects on which it 
wants to find out what it thinks and what it 
wants to do; it might take one after the other, 
fifty-two subjects a year and settle them all — 
one a week. 

Something approximately like this could be 
done by forceful, free understanding given 
forth from a central source — by a World De- 
partment, which could make a kind of national 



Finding the Range 293 

town meeting out of the newspapers and call 
them to order and make it possible for them 
to transact, and transact in order, the thinking 
and seeing business of the people. 

What a hundred million people in America 
for the week shall look at, can be determined. 
Attention for one week in America can all be 
got together for an idea to save a nation as 
easily as it can by a blown-up ship at Halifax. 

As attention has been got together for the 
Red Cross, or for the Red Triangle, or for the 
Liberty Loan in this way it can be for other 
things in due course. Publicity from a cen- 
tral source has already been tried out. We 
all know how much easier it is to do our own 
part in our own town of a national undertak- 
ing when we know that forty thousand other 
towns the same week are doing it. 

Attention in America can be got loosely 
into one national opera glass. 

We often seem blind on a subject. Nobody 
anywhere will seem to see for a second. Then 
the right man in our World Department down 
in Washington will turn the screw and a hun- 



294 The Air-Line to Liberty 

dred million men in a flash will look at a 
crisis together, and all the nation and all the 
world in a minute will know where America 
stands, and what America thinks and what 
America proposes to do. 



Chapter II 295 

ARMING A HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE 

1AM not trying in this chapter to give ad- 
vice to twenty thousand newspapers, or to 
bolster up the New York Times. I am not 
digging in under the massive structure of the 
Chicago Tribune, the Kansas City Star, the 
Boston Transcript and the Associated Press, 
and hoping fondly to put Mount Tom founda- 
tions in under them. 

Our nation and the world are facing a des- 
perate crisis in making democracy work — a 
crisis of the self-government of free peoples. 
If democracy cannot be made safe for the 
world, the last thing we can afford to do is to 
go on in a vague, hopeful way making the 
world safe for democracy. 

If the editors of the country do not mind, 
and will forgive a certain natural interest I 
have in having kept up a little longer on this 
planet a world I would like to live in, and 
would dare to have children in, I will do a 
little thinking out loud on a subject which will 
be left open to them to treat more adequately 
and fully themselves. 



296 The Air-Line to Liberty 

The practicability or soundness of a pro- 
gramme turns very largely upon its having 
men whose imaginations it has touched, to 
carry it out, and all that the outline I am 
about to make is for, is to start somebody up 
more competent than I, to make a better one. 

I remember seeing often in my more de- 
pressed moments in the dining-room at Mul- 
doon's a sign near the door which I realized 
in a dim way must mean me if it meant any- 
body. 

If you want to know who is 
boss here, start something 

I am not forgetting this sign in the follow- 
ing loose sketch of possibilities in the way of 
mobilizing newspapers. 

Efficiency in a government turns on its 
power of presenting ideas to people so that 
they will want them and will help to carry 
them out. 

Efficiency in a people turns on the power 
of the people to present to a Government ideas 
which they want the government to consider 
and carry out. 



Arming a Hundred Million People 297 

These are the two efficiencies a democracy 
must have if it is to compete with autocracy. 

Both of these efficiencies turn on efficiency 
in advertising — on presenting ideas to people, 
which they do not know they want. 

The Government wants to do team-work 
with the people. It cannot do it without pre- 
senting to them its ideas. And the people in 
their turn are full of more or less vague ideas 
— ideas very real and powerful but not yet put 
in order, instincts and desires and hopes which 
they want to present to the government. 

The deciding power in a democracy turns 
on presenting ideas, and upon touching men's 
imaginations with what one wants so that they 
will want it, too, and will let one have it. All 
power turns on winning the cooperation and 
enthusiasm of people who look unwilling. 
This is a way of saying that all power turns on 
advertising — that advertising is Government. 

The problem of making democracy efficient 
narrows down sooner or later to these two 
questions : 

How can a government advertise the ideas 
it is trying to carry out, to the people it serves? 



298 The Air-Line to Liberty 

How can the people advertise the ideas they 
want carried out, to the Government? 

How is any advertising campaign run? 

The meeting place — the great national 
Common of ideas — the Public Market of 
ideas for America, the place where crowds of 
people who are advertising and being adver- 
tised get together and have it out and come to 
terms — is the daily press of the country. 
There is just so much territory of attention. 
There are just so many printed acres every 
day the people of this country meet on — where 
we hold our vast daily contestor tournament of 
what people think — where people determine 
and make known what they want for them- 
selves, for their government and for the world. 

If we are fighting Germany to a finish it 
might seem natural to the man in the Public 
Market to propose something like this: 

The Government should have a Director of 
Publicity who will meet the people daily in 
the Public Market or Common of Ideas and 
present the government's ideas and hopes to 
the people — so that the people will believe 
them and help carry them out. 



Arming a Hundred Million People 299 

The people in their turn should have a Di- 
rector of Publicity who will meet the Govern- 
ment daily in the great Public Market or 
Common Ideas and present ideas to the Gov- 
ernment that they want carried out. 

The Government's Director of Publicity 
should be selected by the President, ratified 
by the Senate as the most important member 
of his Cabinet. 

The people's Director of Publicity should 
be selected by the organized newspapers of 
the country. As regards presenting certain 
ideas of the people to the government the 
newspapers of the country should be edited as 
one newspaper by a cabinet appointed by all 
the newspapers published in twenty thousand 
places every day. 

The people of this country have no right 
to take the President's time or the Govern- 
ment's time in presenting ideas people want 
carried out, in little dabs and nibs and hitches 
at the President's attention. A hundred mil- 
lion people in talking with a President should 
organize what they have to say — put it in 
order, say one thing at a time, and say things 



300 The Air-Line to Liberty 

to a Government as trimly, as compactly, as 
the Bethlehem Steel Company would, or Mr. 
Vail's Telephone and Telegraph Companies, 
or the Pennsylvania Railroad. The sprawling 
hit-or-miss way the people have now of pre- 
senting little ideas to the Government's busy 
attention — the little local patters of ideas — 
sprays and atomizers of opinion — confronting 
the government — what might be called almost 
a perfumery of Thought — is one of the most 
colossal, incredible, incapable spectacles of 
modern times. It is democracy run wild and 
making itself ridiculous. 

The people of the country acting preferably 
or representatively through the combined 
newspaper editors should organize a Peoples' 
Attention Trust for the purpose of selecting 
and sorting out ideas for their President and 
their government to listen to. It has been in- 
timated that the main cross of being in the 
White House is the extraordinary number of 
men in America who will come to see a Pres- 
ident five minutes to tell him a five-minute 
thing — who cannot express a five-minute thing 
in five minutes and who need an hour to give 



Arming a Hundred Million People 301 

him the five-minutes' worth. The hundred 
million people of this country if they will 
learn how to say five-minute things in five 
minutes can have as many five-minute-pieces 
of the President's attention as they want every 
day, each day, day after day. The Govern- 
ment and the people of this country in relation 
to one another should be like two men sitting 
down and talking the country's business over 
for the day every morning. The Kaiser has 
the world-news in his own private newspaper. 
He does not have to sit down the way our 
President does, and go through a great, inor- 
dinate, daily haystack of ideas in twenty thou- 
sand papers looking for needles of ideas the 
people are keeping tucked away in different 
parts of the country which they would like to 
get to the President's attention. 

The People should send in their secretary to 
the President and tell him each morning be- 
fore he begins his day's work, what they would 
be pleased to have him know, consider and do. 

The President would send in his secretary 
to the hundred million people every morn- 
ing as they go to their work and confide to 



302 The Air-Line to Liberty 

them important things for the day that he 
wants them to know. 

If it were not for the attention-waste — the 
waste of the peoples' attention and the waste 
of the President's attention — this country 
could have time to be as free as it likes and as 
efficient as it likes — in the same breath. 

One way to do would be to have two big 
billboards in every paper every day — one the 
President's — in which he posts up on the peo- 
ple's attention what he wants them to know 
in the order it best serves the purpose of the 
people to know it. The other board right next 
to it would be the People's Bulletin Board on 
which the people's representative or specialist 
in presenting the people's ideas to a President, 
should post notices of what the people want 
the President — that morning to know and to 
think about. 

There should be what will amount to direct 
speech between the President and the people 
every day — say five minutes each — two col- 
umns. 

In addition to this — all the rest of the news- 



Arming a Hundred Million People 303 

papers — the editorials and news-columns 
would be open to the President and the people 
both — through the editor and the reporters. 
I believe in the personal initiative of edi- 
tors and reporters and I believe that both the 
people and the President will get better, 
richer, more suggestive — more cooperative 
results out of having what they have to say ex- 
pressed through the minds of editors and re- 
porters — that is, through local editorial em- 
phasis and local news selection than in a rigid 
patent — inside way determined by a World 
Department or by Washington. Each paper 
should express itself and its subscribers in its 
own way — but all papers should express them- 
selves each with reference to all of the others 
— a great coordinated centre of suggestion in 
Washington and with reference to producing 
results together in the public mind and in the 
President's mind. 

The Kaiser's private newspaper is not 
wrong in principle though of course it has 
done more harm than any newspaper printed 
in the world. 



304 The Air-Line to Liberty 

The idea of his having one and the idea 
of our President's having one or an equivalent 
for one, has immeasurable possibilities for 
good. 

All that is the matter with the Kaiser's pri- 
vate newspaper is the Kaiser, and its being 
edited by a spiritual hired-man to please the 
Kaiser. If it were edited to tell the Kaiser 
the truth, this war we now are in, would be 
stopped in a week. 

This is the kind of private newspaper Pres- 
ident Wilson would have, if he had one. He 
would employ a genius at getting before him 
the truth. He ought to have what might be 
called perhaps The White House Gazette, 
written for him to read every morning, before 
he sits down to his work. It would pay the 
nation to have several hundred men in this 
private, more intimate form of news for the 
President cutting across newspapers for him, 
and saving the President's time and getting 
for him — the kinds of truths he could not get 
in any other way — and which could not always 
be confided in daily papers read by everybody. 



Chapter III 305 

NEWS DYNAMOS 

THE publicity team-work I have in mind 
would be a failure unless it is rankly 
democratic in its spirit and unless it is con- 
ceived and operated by men who evoke rather 
than suppress the personality and power and 
independence in the editors of the country. 

It would be suggestive rather than author- 
itative in its spirit. 

The two Secretaries — the people's and the 
President's — each with an enormous nation- 
digesting or nation-assimilating organ to 
work with, would do by far the most impor- 
tant part of their work in supplying the news- 
papers with story-seed and news-seed and raw 
material for news-columns and editorial-col- 
umns to work up. These would be supplied 
from a confidential, national, central stand- 
point, steering the attention of the country or 
more strictly speaking the emphasis through 
the editors' minds rather than around them. 
The main part of the work of the secretaries 
would be work that no one ever saw or knew 
or guessed — not even the men they did the 



306 The Air-Line to Liberty 

work on would guess it — except in a pleasant, 
general way — work on the minds of editors 
— an expert, prolonged, individual study of 
the personalities and temperaments and gifts 
of newspapers resulting in the ability of the 
President's Publicity Secretary to evoke and 
stimulate the minds of editors in directions 
which will be full of discovery to them and 
to the public. 

The listening the editors in this country do 
is what is governing the country. The editors 
I know, happen to knew best, spend much val- 
uable-looking editorial time listening every 
day. Nearly every editor has a little collec- 
tion of people he likes to listen to — not be- 
cause they are people who necessarily know 
as much as he does, but because a few minutes 
with them makes him begin unconsciously 
secreting editorials. The President's Secre- 
tary or Government director of Attention will 
best render his service through the perfect 
freedom and individuality and self-expression 
of all the editors with whom he deals, and will 
render his service best, not by suppressing or 
by pointing or steering — as by furnishing edi- 



News Dynamos 307 

torial writers with editorial-spawn — or fur- 
nishing news-editors with news seed. All man- 
ner of very small looking but big-feeling facts, 
illustrations, symbols and principles will radi- 
ate from our World Department at Washing- 
ton. Attention steering from Washington will 
be dependent for its authority upon its being 
alive, — upon its being in the hands of men with 
gifts for it — a kind of science of spiritual or 
intellectual biology. 



308 Chapter IV 

CENTRAL POWER HOUSE 

GOVERNMENT by the people turns on 
efficiency in presenting ideas in the right 
order and the right emphasis to a Government. 
Government for the people turns on efficiency 
in presenting ideas in the right order to a peo- 
ple: 

The efficiency in other words of a democ- 
racy turns upon two national, perennial, con- 
tinuous advertising campaigns, one conducted 
by the people toward the government and the 
other by the government toward the people, 
and both acting through highly organized 
agencies — trained experts and geniuses in at- 
tracting and holding attention and directing 
attention to a purpose. 

Nothing will take the place in America's 
present crisis of America's having a national 
presence of mind, and there is no way of 
America's having presence of mind — of secur- 
ing the presence of mind of a hundred million 
people, of finding out what a hundred million 
people want done, and no way of getting at- 
tention to it and of getting it done except by 



Central Power House 309 

making arrangements for deliberate team- 
work of attention between the government and 
the people. 

We are competing with the most sublime 
and incredible Attention-Trust the world has 
ever known — the German empire. All of Ger- 
many's efficiency abroad, turns on its Atten- 
tion-Trust at home. If Germany had as good 
an Attention-Trust abroad as it has at home, 
Germany would not be conquerable. If a de- 
mocracy like ours, an intellectually loose- 
jointed, slow, good-natured democracy, is go- 
ing to compete with a trim, swift, secret-em- 
pire like Germany, it is only going to be able 
to do it by having more presence of mind than 
Germany has and — by having what might be 
called for the time being and at least during 
this present crisis and for our temporary pur- 
pose, an almost military presence of mind — an 
almost military attention-control. We must 
present ideas as armies and in companies and 
choose and choose voluntarily, for the time be- 
ing, to submit to a Commander-in-Chief of 
ideas if the specific thing we stand for and 
propose to prove to military nations is that 



310 The Air-Line to Liberty 

ideas or spiritual forces are the real forces 
that rule nations and determine the fate of 
the world. 

Here for instance is this idea in this book 
— this idea of what I want for my people and 
the world. I have just been going over it in 
my mind. 

I want the American Government to com- 
mand the air over Europe, swamp Germany 
with news as to what America is fighting for, 
cut off the German army from behind. 

I want Mr. Howard Coffin to say that if we 
can hold the sky over Europe it can be done if 
we can get airplanes and air-men enough. 

I want Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford to say 
that if Congress will supply the money and 
the factories of America will stop making too 
many pleasure cars or whatever they think 
necessary America can make airplanes enough. 

This leaves three problems. How can we 
get Congress to vote the money for America 
to command the air over Europe? How can 
we get the people of America to furnish the 
money to command the air over Europe? How 
can we get the American people to furnish 



Central Power House 311 

the men to command the air over Europe? 

These are all three problems of publicity 
— problems of touching the imagination of the 
American people with what they could do 
with the air over Europe if they get it. 

This brings me to the final thing I want. I 
want the attention of twenty thousand editors 
in America to the Hole of air over Europe. 
I want twenty thousand editors to agree with 
me on four points enough to lay them fully 
and culminatingly before the people. 

If there were a World Department, and it 
saw national possibilities in my idea, the idea 
could have a hundred million people saying 
that they wanted it (if they wanted it), in a 
week. 

I do not want to be understood as advocat- 
ing for a World Department in America — 
the remotest degree of outside restraint. I 
am advocating what might be called a kind 
of national news-magneto, or I might express 
what I am trying to by saying that the typical 
government attention-engineer will act as a 
news-carburetor. He and his department in 



312 The Air-Line to Liberty 

their relation to editors' minds will deal in 
official news-spark plugs for the country from 
day to day. 

He will sweep without their necessarily 
knowing it or caring about it the national 
keyboard of what editors think. 

We want in a democracy above all things 
editors to be the editors of their own papers, 
but also because we are in a democracy there 
ought to be (agreed upon by themselves, and 
acting in a suggestive way) an editor to edit 
editors. 

Why should not editors arrange to have a 
national editor in chief, the one they like best, 
one who understands them, and who operates 
after the manner of the Associated Press. He 
would preside like the Speaker of the House, 
over a National Daily Congress, meeting on 
wood pulp. 

He would act as a balance and maintain 
evenly, not only the democratic or centrifu- 
gal, but the autocratic or centripetal power of 
the nation's thought. 



Chapter V 313 

THE ENGINEERS OF SILENCE 

NOT the least part of the effectiveness of 
a Publicity Control Department would 
be its hints as to silence and emphasis at cer- 
tain times, and its saving of news — (as the 
President saved the Zimmermann note) until 
it can be made to accomplish a huge national 
event at one convincing stroke. 

A large part of massing public attention in 
a democracy would necessarily turn on pool- 
ing issues, on silence and emphasis which the 
Government could render by being confiden- 
tial with the press and winning its voluntary 
cooperation. 

As soon as our editors in acting through 
their own organized body, come to wield pub- 
lic attention as a great single national weapon 
against the enemy, there is going to be an ex- 
traordinary, new appreciation in America of 
silence. 

A good deal of white paper helps people 
to notice an idea. 

All one has to do, to see how silence demo- 
cratically wielded, could probably do for the 



314 The Air-Line to Liberty 

country, is to glance over the advertisements 
in the back of the first magazine one picks up. 

If the editors of America are going to take 
the stock of attention in America per day, 
seriously — if they are going to take a nation's 
attention for a day seriously — as Germany 
takes her army, — if they are going to mass at- 
tention and hurl attention and make a huge, 
national drive of attention, silence in America 
and white paper — are going to get more and 
more priceless. One already sees what white 
paper is worth in commercial ideas and the 
value it already has in getting attention to com- 
mercial ideas will be still greater in national 
ones. 

The advertising men in the magazines do 
very well. 

The space is paid for — not only on the 
paper but the space in people's minds is paid 
for at very high rates and they have to use 
both kinds of space very economically. 

The main thing that an advertising man in 
presenting ideas depends on is silence and lis- 
tening to the reader. No advertising man 
tumbles out his ideas before the reader the 



The Engineers of Silence 315 

way the government tumbles out ideas before 
the people. He is secretive and keeps things 
waiting. An advertising man calculates every 
word. If ideas are forces and are supposed 
to work, ideas must get into attention in the 
right order to work and they must get in one 
at a time. The main attribute of the way ideas 
are being presented by the government and 
the people to one another in America just now 
is that they are presented hit or miss, and on 
all subjects all of the time. 

If our government and our people are go- 
ing to be effective in presenting ideas to each 
other — there must be some one appointed — a 
governing board of attention appointed for 
both sides, to leave out words for a hundred 
million people and leave out ideas for them 
so that a hundred million people when they 
lift up their voice and talk shall make sense. 

Attention in this country is a motor-affair 
and it ought to be run like an automobile. It 
must go down certain streets at certain times 
and through certain places. Hence, the two 
Grand Traffic Managers of Publicity pro- 
posed. We will want freedom for all — but 



3 16 The Air -Line to Liberty 

in order to have freedom for all we want a 
traffic manager to turn traffic where it counts 
and where it can get through. 

Three-fourths of the business of our two At- 
tention-Secretaries will be turning attention- 
automobiles down side streets or side avenues 
and making due arrangements for the pageant 
or procession of American public opinion and 
American public will, to go by. Even if in 
our new arrangements for governing the coun- 
try and making democracy efficient and snug 
— we determine that we do not need a secre- 
tary of speech, we will need a secretary of 
silence. 

A big, new, powerful idea that is being 
presented to a people depends largely for its 
value and its grip on their attention and their 
wills, upon the silences in it and upon the 
things that are not said. 

Silence in America can only be engineered 
by men we can trust. It cannot be engineered 
by five thousand newspapers offhand. It must 
be engineered by men the newspapers appoint 
and who represent them all, and who represent 
all the people. If the government of a coun- 



The Engineers of Silence 317 

try is the attention of the country the attention 
must have emphasis, and must use selection. 

The newspapers of the country are the coun- 
tenance of the country. A national face must 
have features if it is to have an expression. 
This means the use of national emphasis and 
national silence for the purpose of national 
expression. A government cannot be efficient 
and democracy cannot be efficient without 
silence — and silence can only be efficient when 
it is trusted and when it is authoritative, and 
when it represents and is known to represent 
all of the people. 



318 Chapter VI 

THE LORDS OF ATTENTION 

THE best way for Americans to advertise 
democracy and to get Germans to want 
democracy, is to make democracy work in 
America. 

The Germans do not think we are making 
democracy work in America, and as long as 
they know and as long as they know that we 
know that they are at least half right, the 
only way to convince Germans how Democ- 
racy works is to beat them with it. 

The rub comes in making it work very 
quickly very well indeed, when we all know 
it has hardly ever worked before. 

The rub comes in summoning the nation's 
presence of mind. 

The lords of attention, the men to whom 
nearly all the attention of the country is rented 
by the day, by the people — the editors of the 
country, are the men to whom one naturally 
turns first to summon America's presence of 
mind. 

I hope that in these chapters in which I 
have exalted their profession, the editors of 



The Lords of Attention 319 

the country will forgive the editor of a very 
little magazine on a very little mountain, for 
expecting so much, for sketching the necessity 
and that challenges the nation, and trying to 
indicate in a momentary way — a direction of 
action. 

That is all it is. It is all I can do to keep 
from cutting this section out of the book as 
the last pages go to press. I would, if I did 
not feel that the editors of the country would 
correct them and finish them. 

If the editors of America cannot organize 
— if the editors of the country cannot make 
democracy work, if even editors cannot do 
team-work together, give direction, motive- 
power to their own vision and to the vision 
of the people, how can the rest of us expect 
to do it? 

The' hotel men of America have organized 
for the conservation of food for the stomachs 
of the people and the editors will soon have 
to organize for the conservation of food for 
their minds. 

We are fighting the most massive concen- 
tration of attention, the most terrific Turbine 



320 The Air-Line to Liberty 

Wheel of attention, the world has known, in 
the German Empire. 

It does seem as if attention might be organ- 
ized by the men who have the most of it in 
America and its motors set going, together. 

I have believed that editors — in the control 
of their product, will rise to the standard of 
laborers, organize for the country a Labor 
Union of Thinkers, a Brotherhood of Loco- 
motive Engineers of Attention, and Firemen 
of Thought! 



VIII 

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN 
EUROPE 



Chapter I 

AMERICA GOES CALLING 

WHAT we propose to do with our air- 
planes in getting the attention of the 
people in Germany, we could do to equal ad- 
vantage with our Allies in getting their people 
and our people into what might be called a 
more or less personal and direct connection 
through the sky. 

We would wake up Germany out of its 
four-year news-trance in a week. 

And if we established a sky connection in 
Russia we would soon have Germany practi- 
cally whipped. Russia once waked up would 

be to Germany an America moved over right 

321 



322 The Air-Line to Liberty 

next door. Instead of moving America over 
in spoonfuls and in ships in a year America 
with a few airplanes could make Russia an 
America with her voice in the ear of Germany 
almost at once. 

We would not need to do the airplane ad- 
vertising on so large a scale in Russia or in 
the whole of Russia because Russia wants to 
believe us at heart. We could focus on stra- 
tegic points. Ten airplanes up over Petrograd 
confiding in the people in the streets and de- 
livering the papers from America, would re- 
duce Petrograd to common sense about Ger- 
many and about democracy in a few days. 

Then Moscow. Then after we had done 
Petrograd and Moscow, Petrograd and Mos- 
cow themselves would cheerfully do the other 
cities. And our ten airplanes could each go 
back to Germany. 

The same method would be the best way to 
get at our other Allies, and to express to 
them what we mean by advertising to our en- 
emies instead of shooting them, touching their 
imagination with what good publicity the 
news-bomb is, and how it works. Ten Ameri- 



America Goes Calling 323 

can airplanes up over Paris, London, Man- 
chester (where the Manchester Guardian is 
published) and Edinburgh and Dublin, could 
keep America's ideas and America's prayer 
and hope and America's spiritual presence, 
even our physical presence in constant touch, 
— every morning and every night, with our 
Allies, with the noble and wearied people to 
whose rescue we have come so late. 

America with a few airplanes, will make up 
time with her Allies. And in a way too of 
course one's own private news-bomb from 
America which fell in one's own backyard or 
which one picked out of the eave's trough un- 
der the dormer in one's chamber window in 
the morning, seems more intimate and real and 
personal, and more direct from America than 
the self-same idea would, copied of! in a West- 
minster Gazette which one bought for the 
same old penny, from the same old news 
woman, on the same old step at the foot of 
St. Paul's. 



324 Chapter II 

THE NEW WORLD-GAME 

I HAD hoped to put into this chapter a 
few sample news-bombs in which New 
York and Chicago and our other American 
cities could confide to London, Paris and 
Rome and our Allies what we are fighting for. 

But perhaps the best way to begin just at 
this stage will be to give first what might be 
called a kind of general background of what 
America believes. 

America's World Department will wish, I 
imagine, to conduct four groups of Exchange 
Advertising Campaigns, one a mutual adver- 
tising campaign between our own government 
and people so that we can act together, one be- 
tween ourselves and our Allies, so that we can 
act as a unit toward Germany, one with neu- 
trals to get them to use their influence with 
Germany, and one with Germany. 

While our World Department is being 
started and perhaps as a way of starting it, 
America will propose to her Allies, to neutrals 
and to Russia that all the nations of the world 
unite to propose to Germany the following 



The New World-Game 325 

platform for the new world we are going to 
arrange to have. 

PLATFORM FOR A NEW WORLD 

FIRST. We are always going to disagree. 
The fate of all nations swings to-day on our 
discovering together and adopting together an 
understood inflexible method of disagreeing 
wisely, progressively, conclusively, and to the 
point and like civilized human beings. 

SECOND. We are always going to com- 
pete. The fate of nations swings on our dis- 
covering together and adopting together a 
method of competing in which we respect 
others, respect ourselves, and compete in a 
way we like. 

THIRD. The present method of compet- 
ing which Germany has been getting ready for 
forty years and has tried to establish, is not 
one that we like. And we do not believe, now 
that the Germans are seeing how it works, 
that Germany likes it. Germany has de- 
manded a method of competing which seems 
to us impossible and suicidal. To use milita- 
rism to stop militarism is suicide, and we do 



326 The Air -Line to Liberty 

not propose in other nations to commit suicide 
to stop suicide for a minute longer than we 
can help. 

FOURTH. For Germany's competition in 
suicide we propose as a means of ending this 
war and of never having another, Mutual Or- 
ganized Permanent Advertising Campaigns 
Between Nations, spending as many million 
dollars a day on these campaigns as before the 
war we have spent in all nations on armies and 
navies. 

FIFTH. We believe that if disagreeing 
and competing for a world are conducted in 
the advertising spirit and by the advertising 
method, we will be able to determine in all 
nations and among ourselves to the satisfac- 
tion of all, the best men and the best methods 
in all activities and callings and in all nations, 
to rule mankind and represent the will of the 
people of the world. 

The gist of our reason that competition by 
advertising and by experimenting will result 
in the natural selection of the best and fairest 
men in each nation and all nations to be trus- 
tees for us all, is as follows. 



The New World-Game 327 

Ninety-five per cent, of a good advertise- 
ment is the listening in it. 

It listens to the people it is addressed to. 
It knows all it can know about them before it 
speaks. It tries to know more about how they 
really feel, and what they really want, than 
they know themselves. 

Advertising puts a premium on courage, 
frankness and the pursuit of mutual interests 
and mutual dependence, just as militarism 
puts a premium on fear, secrecy, mutual hos- 
tility and self-sufficiency. 

An advertising competition between two na- 
tions will be a listening-competition between 
the nations. 

The nation that listens the best and that has 
the most people in it listening, will consider 
the people with whom it deals the most, and 
will be in a position to lead. 

The nations that have been considered, will 
all want it to lead. In earning its leadership 
by serving others it will have learned how to 
keep it by serving others. It will have learned 
that it will lose it, if it does not. 



328 The Air-Line to Liberty 

America and the nations with her arrayed 
against Germany to-day do not claim to have 
exclusively a population of angels. The last 
thing we want to see abolished in civilized life 
is competition, or rather emulation. We do 
not even want selfishness abolished — a decent 
amount of it in the right place — (it would 
make us feel lonely) and the only practical 
way we can discover to stop war is to provide 
a substitute in which a decent thoughtful 
amount of selfishness will be allowed for and 
can be made to work. It will never work as 
fast or as sure as unselfishness, but we believe 
that selfishness mixed with imagination about 
other people, and stirred up with advertising, 
can be made to keep nations out of war. 

As a method of competition touching men's 
imaginations instead of hitting them in the 
stomach has two advantages. The first is that 
in the long run, men who can advertise, per- 
suade, convince and change men's minds are 
in the long run a fitter and fairer set of men 
to survive than men who can shoot, sneak, 
bully and blow up men's bodies. The chances 






The New World-Game 329 

are that men who can master the imaginations 
and reverse the ideals and control the motives 
of other men's lives, will be the real superiors 
and will have the superior civilization to ad- 
vertise. 

The second advantage of advertising as a 
substitute for shooting lies in the organic na- 
ture of the advertising process. There will 
be not only a higher competition conducted 
on a higher plane by a higher order of men, 
but the competition is one in which men of 
cooperative and mutual genius will be the ones 
who have the greatest success. 

We will have competition in advertising 
to find out which are the best advertisers — 
which men with which things have the most 
power to read the minds of others. The psycho- 
logical basis of advertising is clairvoyant — is 
a genius for understanding instead of misun- 
derstanding. Even if its object is competitive 
its method is cooperative and the moment the 
nations enter into an understood and organized 
substitution of advertising for armament and 
begin a vast process of mutual finding out and 
mutual exchange and mutual modification and 



330 The Air-Line to Liberty 

mutual experiment we will have peace by a 
converging of interests. By a huge daily in- 
terchange and every-day process men's lives 
will flow together the way brooks flow down 
hill. 

The substitution of a rational and human 
competition for an irrational and inhuman one 
is the only way out. The nations are fighting 
Germany because, with all their faults, they 
do not want to compete in the way she does. 
They are superior because they had assumed 
of everybody — of Germany included — that 
any deliberate attempts to compete again in 
the world by shooting and territorial con- 
quest was out of the question. Their very 
stupidity and unawareness was due to the fact 
that they were busy competing in another way. 

After all — it is what civilization is — the 
plane men compete on. In advertising and 
dramatizing ideas men who compete, compete 
in order to find out who is the best to lead, and 
when we find out who the best men are to lead, 
what they lead in is cooperation. We com- 
pete to cooperate. We cooperate to compete. 
It is a centripetal-centrifugal process and the 



The New World-Game 331 

men who have mastered this process more 
than any other type of men in the present 
world are the men who have the gifts of the 
great salesman, and of the true and permanent 
advertiser. 

Advertising is the science of mutualism. 
The nation which can advertise best will de- 
serve to lead the others. 

With advertising as a substitute for war 
leadership in different things will be natu- 
rally divided among the nations. The things 
in which a nation has the most natural gift for 
considering the wants of other people will be 
the things in which each nation shall lead. 

When America's World Department gets 
the attention of the world, and competition 
in advertising is set up as a substitute for com- 
petition in shooting, we will be in a world 
in which, in a fine businesslike unreligious- 
looking way as a matter of course without 
praying about it and without singing psalms 
about it, Power in this world will be sorted 
out among people according to their power to 
think of others. 

The New Testament will be all in the day's 



332 The Air-Line to Liberty 

work. Gradually we will reserve our pray- 
ing and psalm-singing for some more truly 
religious and less rudimentary thing than 
keeping from shooting each other. 

After all, with all our cathedrals and our 
music mounting to the skies, it does seem 
rather pathetic that all a whole world is pray- 
ing for — now for four years, is a mean humble 
thing like — keeping from shooting each other! 



Chapter III 333 

THE END OF THE SELF-SUFFICIENT NATION 

\\ /'E, the nations of the world outside the 
* * Central Powers of Europe, believe 
and herewith declare our belief. 

We believe that if nations are going to 
return to self-sufficiency, after the war be- 
cause they are afraid another war is coming, 
another war will come. No nation really 
wants self-sufficiency. 

Clams are self-sufficient. 

The more highly developed animals and 
people and nations become, the more mutu- 
ally dependent they are and the more mutu- 
ally unprotected they can afford to be. Self- 
sufficiency in a nation is a by-gone, left-over, 
military idea. A self-sufficient nation, to-day, 
would commit suicide. Everybody in it would 
be bored to death. A self-sufficient city would 
soon be a village. Everybody would begin 
moving out of it as fast as he could. Nobody 
would ever want to know a self-sufficient fam- 
ily, and a self-sufficient man would not even 



334 The Air-Line to Liberty 

take the trouble to have a self-sufficient fam- 
ily and would be too tired to get married. A 
self-sufficient baby would die in a few minutes. 
Voluntary and eager and truthful mutual de- 
pendence is the life of everything. The small- 
est size self-sufficiency can be done up in now, 
in 1917 years after Christ, is world-size. 

We believe that the way out for great 
nations after the war is to make conclusive, 
convinced, thorough-going and significant ar- 
rangements for being dependent on each other. 
To do this they must take aggressive measures 
and begin huge, mutual advertisements with 
each other, competing for one another's confi- 
dence and good-will, competing for the power, 
leadership with one another, the voluntary and 
acknowledged right of leadership in the things 
we can make the world want from us the most. 

We believe the nations that are the most 
dependent on the most other nations and 
can manage soonest to have the most other na- 
tions dependent upon them will soon be, both 
at the same time, in the same way, the material 
and the spiritual masters of the world. This 



The End of the Self -Sufficient Nation 335 

is to be brought to pass by advertising, by ad- 
vertising now. 

We believe the future peace of the world 
turns on exchange, upon our having an in- 
ternational clearing house for the spiritual 
values and the material products each nation 
can best produce and best put forward in ex- 
change for the spiritual values and material 
products of other nations. 

Germany has material, and as she thinks, 
spiritual products that the rest of the world 
thinks it does not want. Either the world is 
not informed about how valuable these things 
are to it or Germany is not informed about 
how valuable they are not to it. In either case 
the quickest, cheapest way to find out the facts 
and get down to intelligent and useful action 
is for Germany to advertise in the world and 
for the world to advertise in Germany. 

If the increasing of advertising between na- 
tions is attended to, the reducing of armaments 
practically takes care of itself. Nobody will 
have any time to bother with huge, clumsy ar- 
rangements for shooting and being ready to 



336 The Air-Line to Liberty 

shoot people we cannot get along without, and 
who cannot get along without us. 

If this is the end we are making towards 
Germany, when we get the Germans where 
they will listen to us what shall we find best 
to say? What shall we do? What is there 
that we can say and do now to prepare for the 
real test of civilization? 

The real test of civilization to-day is going 
to be its wisdom, its power in making terms 
with Germany. 

What is the wise and strong way to make 
terms with Germany? 

What is the way a sane man can deal with 
a crazy man's fear? 

Hold him, get away his gun. 

Then let him watch one making all the ar- 
rangements for killing him and then not do- 
ing it. 

We will get the mastery of the air, sweep 
the air clear of Germans and then we will treat 
Germans, not as Germans treat us, but as we 
hope to be treated by Germans and as we are 



The End of the Self -Sufficient Nation 337 

going to be treated by Germans when we ad- 
vertise to them and when they have advertised 
to us, and when we know each other as we 
are. 



338 Chapter IV 

A LITTLE COAL SHALL LEAD US 

ALL nations are making ready in the next 
few months to sign the death warrant 
of war. 

What is taking place daily before our eyes in 
the human spirit is the asphyxiation of war. 

War is over forever. The planet is to be 
provided with a nation-lock-up. 

Any nation that shall resist the offer of 
reasonable advertising and experimenting 
as a substitute for war, any nation that shall 
still believe in war, shall continue to get ready 
for it and try to make the rest of us get ready 
for it, shall be cut off from the family of na- 
tions, shall be moved bodily at the public ex- 
pense of the planet to a back corner of the 
world, walled in, and fed through a hole. 

The attempt of Germany and the attempt 
of all other nations she will try to sweep in 
her wake to be self-sufficient as regards Coal 
and Steel and Copper and Nitrates with the 
wireless mocking through the sky, seems to 
America and her Allies sentimental and ro- 
mantic beyond belief. 



A Little Coal Shall Lead Us 339 

As a plain matter of fact which any nation 
but a megalomaniac nation would see, the bare 
bleak material forces of the world, the brute 
needs of all nations are going to compel all 
nations to act as the members of one body. 
To-morrow, day after to-morrow (we shall 
see it with our own eyes!) Coal, Copper, Ni- 
trates, Oil and Steel shall grasp all we know, 
and all we have in their swarthy hands, chuck 
the grave empty heads of twenty foolish na- 
tions together, and say, "DAMN YOU, 
LOVE EACH OTHER/" 

It is a pitiful sight — the majestic imperious 
human spirit being led at last by the Things 
it eats, and by the Things it wears, by heathen 
Metals, Acids, and Fertilizers to notice God. 

Civilization is saying plaintively to Metals, 
Acids and Fertilizers: "Almost thou per- 
suadest Me to be a Christian!" 

And all the while the wireless — our own 
wireless that we thought of ourselves — by 
night, by day, mocking at us through the sky! 



IX 



THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA IN 
GERMANY 



Chapter I 

UNDELIVERED LETTERS 

1 OFTEN see people walking alone 
through crowds in the street with their 
lips moving. 

"Who is it you are talking to? There 
doesn't seem to be anybody!" I feel like step- 
ping up to them and saying: "You don't mean 
to say, do you, that with a great crowd of peo- 
ple all around you like this, you are merely 
talking to yourself?" 

Nine times out of ten when people go by 
one alone like this, all still and with their lips 
moving, they are thinking in the second per- 
son. They are talking to somebody they are 
going to do something to. 

341 



342 The Air-Line to Liberty 

If people's thoughts about what is going on 
in the world to-day had envelopes on them, 
nine out of ten billion of them — thoughts we 
are all having to-day any hour and any min- 
ute, anywhere, would be found to be addressed 
to Germans. 

Nations go elbowing by each other unseeing 
— mumbling in the street to Germans. 

For four years people's minds in every 
country of the world have been undelivered 
letters to Germans. 

Now that we are going to insist — some of 
us that some of the hundred billion letters to 
Germany get through, it is perhaps a good 
time to ask: "Which letters shall we get 
through first and what shall be in them?" 

Of course it is for our World Department, 
when we have one, to decide, but I have been 
thinking. 

I have been making out a little list of letters 
which I think it might be well to have deliv- 
ered first in the heaped-up four-year mail of 
the Kaiser, when we get it through. 

I had intended (if this book were not being 
jerked out of my hands into the printers) to 



Undelivered Letters 343 

put in this chapter a few sample news-bombs 
such as I have in mind thousands of Amer- 
icans will write when we begin by air-plane 
corresponding once more with Germans. 

Ten Million American Germans in America 
to sixty-six German-Germans in Ger- 
many. 

American Labor Unions to German Labor 
Unions. 

The American National Chamber of Com- 
merce to German National Chamber of 
Commerce. 

Advertisement of Henry Ford's Workmen to 
Krupps'. 

Advertisement of Henry Ford to the Kaiser. 

Advertisement from John Spargo to Liebe- 
necht. 

Advertisement of Conversion of George Vie- 
reck by George Viereck — to anybody. 

Advertisement of Advertising as the World's 
Substitute for War. 

Advertisement to Germans to give us some 
more of their old fine "MADE IN GER- 
MANY" advertising and begin quick. 



344 The Air-Line to Liberty 

Advertisement to Germans to look up and put 
forward Germans we can trust. 

Advertisement for an International Ocean. 

Advertisement for a World Police. 

Advertisement for a World Court. 

Advertisement for World Trustees (selected 
from World Departments of each na- 
tion). 

Advertisement for a World Legislature. 

Advertisement for International Experiment 
Station in Mutual Interests. 

The Newspapers of America to the News- 
papers of Germany. 

Ninety-seven American Authors to Ninety- 
seven German Authors. 

American Catholics to German Catholics. 

Twenty Thousand American Protestant 
Churches to the sons of Martin Luther. 

American Orchestras — from Boston to Se- 
attle — to the Orchestra at Beyreuth. 

The Children of America to the Children 
of Germany (Letters arranged by the 
Youth's Companion) . 

Letter from Thomas A. Edison, the man who 
thought of Moving Pictures for Ger- 



Undelivered Letters 345 

mans, to throw on the screen in all Ger- 
mans who see his Moving Pictures. 

Letter from Alexander Graham Bell on his 
own telephone to be telephoned to all Ger- 
mans at their telephones. 

The Little White Dog with His Master's 
Voice, to all children young and old lis- 
tening to-night to victrolas. 

The Ferry Boats of New York to the North 
German Lloyd and Hamburg-American 
Lines — those vast lost ocean-ferries be- 
tween the souls of two great peoples. 

Advertisement for World Department in each 
nation. 

For Treaties guaranteed by advertising, which 
would be made to work and kept alive 
by agreements to advertise, treaties which 
would be living treaties instead of effigies 
and lawyers' scraps of paper. 

For American type of diplomats from all na- 
tions — all cards on the table. 

For Crowds of Consuls in cities instead of one 
or two. 

For Reversed Spies — an advertisement of the 
advantages of a Secret Service for de- 



346 The Air -Line to Liberty 

tecting friends instead of enemies, and 
for ferreting out mutual interests between 
the nations. 

A Letter from Life to Fliegende Blatter. 

Notice served by Marconi and Wright and 
Curtis Brothers on the German Censor. 

Billy Sunday to the Reichstag. 

Billy Sunday to Twenty Thousand German 
Clergymen. 

Thirty Million American Women with their 
new votes, to the Women of Germany. 

An Advertisement of the Fate of the World. 

An Advertisement of the Graves of all Na- 
tions. 

The Women with Child in America to the 
Women with Child in Germany. 

A Letter from the women with child near the 
German armies, to the women of Ger- 
many. 

A Letter from the German General Staff and 
Hindenburg to all churches, to be read 
at Baptisms. 

But one could go on forever — thinking of 
possible letters. I cannot keep from imagin- 



Undelivered Letters 347 

ing them and have been writing them — if there 
were room for them. Any one can. Every 
one will. Our minds have been addressed 
to Germans for four years. The dammed up 
mail to Germans to-day chokes the gates of 
the earth. 

If the Kaiser defies our overtures and will 
not let us advertise America to the German 
people we will advertise the Kaiser to the Ger- 
man people and the German people to the 
Kaiser. We will keep the German people 
and the German Government intimately in- 
formed, via the sky, about each other. 

The American people will send over letters 
every day with news in them from the Ameri- 
can people that the Kaiser and his people will 
read over each other's shoulders. We will 
not have to talk about freedom to the German 
people. It will be there before their eyes and 
almost before they think of it, knowing all 
about us that their Kaiser knows and know- 
ing it the same minute, and knowing that their 
Kaiser knows they know it they will be freed. 
They will be freed by the same words ad- 



348 The Air-Line to Liberty 

dressed by the American people privately to 
them and their Kaiser together. 

If the Kaiser wants a letter from us, he will 
have to ask the people to let him see theirs. 

When he reads what the American people 
say to the German people the Kaiser will see 
in a flash before they know how they look, 
how the German people look. And when the 
people see the Kaiser reading the news from 
America they will see how the Kaiser looks 
before he knows how he looks. 

This will be awkward sometimes for the 
Kaiser. 

Americans will distribute from her air- 
planes little momentary democracies wherever 
they go. 

The heaped up letters from America at last, 
the miles of emotion from a thousand streets 
are going to be gathered together massed, 
wirelessed to Europe, translated into German, 
put in bags and dropped by airplanes on the 
people to whom they belong. 

The Kaiser can call like anybody else for 
his letters from the American people, at the 
People's Post Office. 



Undelivered Letters 349 

The German people for many months of 
the more liberal sort — the Germans we think 
we have known in years gone by, and that we 
cannot give up, have seemed to us for a long 
and weary time to be saying to us underneath 
their breath, and as if they were being watched 
something like this. (They seem to us to have 
underneath an understanding with us about 
their Kaiser.) They seem to be saying, 
"This poor tragical figure you see here that 
you have watched and we have watched for 
years — this poor tragical figure here, pinioned 
soul and body under his own Machine, with 
the huge wheels of his own hell going round 
and round and round him sucking in a world 
— this man we put forward to you, because we 
cannot help it, to represent us in dealing with 
you." 

"Very well then," America will say, "you 
have a right to say you will use this man as 
your representative in talking to us. But we 
have a right to say that we will not use him 
as our representative to you. We will ex- 
change no word with him except when some 



35° 



The Air -Line to Liberty 



other nation is in the room, or you — sixty-six 
million of you are in the room. 

"There will be no private letters from the 
American people for him from this day. 

"If your Kaiser wants news from America, 
the same ordinary Public Rural-Sky-Delivery 
you all have to have he will have to have. 

"You and your Kaiser can go out for your 
letters together, pick them up together and 
read them together." 



Chapter II 351 

THE RIGHT TO CHANGE EACH OTHER'S MINDS 

IF one were to try to put up the American 
temperament and what it stands for, in a 
series of clear propositions, it might be this. 

It is not the truth that governs the world 
and governs people. It is what people think 
is the truth. 

In Amercia we are not nationally addicted 
to the sense of beauty or reason or to art and 
philosophy. We are — taking us by and large 
— workers in will and in facts. When we want 
to get our way, we cut across lots in our minds 
and deal with the facts in things as they are, 
and with the facts in people as they are. 

The most important and unchangeable fact 
about facts in people is, that they can be 
changed. The facts about a man for the 
most part are only temporarily allowed to be 
facts about him — by him and by us. 

The same seems true to us about nations. 
It is about to be true about nations, and about 
sixty-six million people in Germany. The 
facts that exist in the sixty-six million Ger- 
mans — the facts that we have in Germans, are 



352 The Air-Line to Liberty 

merely our point of departure to the facts that 
we want. We do not let our minds fool them- 
selves about Germans, but the Germans we 
have are instinctively unconsciously to us, raw 
material for Germans we want. 

The moral is not far to seek. If we face the 
Germans as they are and the Germans that we 
have, deliberately roll up our sleeves before 
them and proceed to make them over before 
their own eyes into Germans that we want, we 
must make some regular decent and polite 
arrangement for giving them a chance to do 
the same to us. 

This is precisely what we want to do. 

We in America, — Americans the Germans 
have to have, offer ourselves as raw material 
to Germans, to be made over by Germans into 
Americans Germans would rather have. 

Hence this plan of mutual advertising be- 
tween our people which we now propose. We 
believe we could put in some very important 
touches on Germans and that they could put 
in touches on us, which neither of us could 
ever begin, in a thousand years, to put in on 
ourselves. 



Right to Change Each Others Minds 353 

It seems to us that these touches can be made 
better, made more hopefully and more per- 
manently by using advertisements and experi- 
ments on each other than by the rudimentary 
and to say the least rather visionary way, we 
are using now of blowing each other to atoms, 
up into a kind of pulp or human protoplasm 
or planetary dust. 

This constructive philosophy or platform 
for action which I have outlined, is as it 
seems to me what America is for in the world. 

We may be said to be in a certain rough 
sense a nation of selected geniuses — selected 
out of all nations to make ourselves ridiculous 
if we like, or sublime if we like, in this 
way. With all our honest provincial blem- 
ishes of thinking and feeling, which any po- 
lite, grown-up nation in Europe can see 
at a glance, and with all our faults which can- 
not but correct themselves and correct us, I 
believe that in the present desperate hunger 
and need of the nations, it is going to be a 
kind of brute faith we have in ourselves, a 
kind of incurable, boundless hope we have for 



354 The Air-Line to Liberty 

others that is going to hammer a civilization 
out of the present iron emptiness and stony 
sorrow of the world. 

It is for us to say whether this constructive 
fire within our souls, this spirit of advertising 
and melting down this love of beginning, and 
rebeginning, this passion for changing our 
own minds and changing others, in this hour 
of tragic eagerness among the older peoples 
looking to us, — shall make us ridiculous or 
make us sublime. 

If it is not to be ridiculous, it will have to 
be practical. The first thing we will have to 
do will be to avoid vagueness, all loving pa- 
triotic moonshine, and have ready for our- 
selves and for others a specific, vigorous and 
universal plan, which begins somewhere in 
particular and begins now. 

This means beginning with Germany. 



Chapter III 355 

LOOKING AND TRYING 

WHEN two nations or two people quar- 
rel because they do not know what 
they think, the first practical, sensible thing 
to do, seems to be for them to go home and 
find out what they think and advertise them- 
selves to themselves until they agree with 
themselves as the first step to agreeing with 
others. 

When as it often happens two nations or 
two people disagree for the precise reason 
that they do know what they think and for the 
precise reason that they do know they do not 
agree, the thing for them to do is to exchange 
twenty million dollar advertising and listen- 
ing campaigns until they sort their difficulties 
out into the following classes and treat them 
accordingly. 

1. Ex-disagreements. 

2. Difficulties that dissolve at once when 

properly stated. 

3. Difficulties that can be met for the time 

being, by agreeing to disagree. 



356 The Air-Line to Liberty 

4. Difficulties that can possibly or probably 

be settled by further discussion. 

5. Difficulties that will have to be settled 

by experiments both sides make alone. 

6. Difficulties that will have to be settled 

by experiments both sides make to- 
gether. 

7. Finally, mutual advertising to all con- 

cerned of the conclusions and results 
of experiments. 

• • • • a 

There might be four groups of advertise- 
ments a World Department would arrange 
for in dealing with Germany or any other 
country. 

FIRST. ADVERTISING ILLUSIONS 
AWAY. 

There are the illusions the German peo- 
ple have about the American people. The 
German Government and the American Gov- 
ernment will cooperate to conduct a campaign 
in Germany to remove them; there are illu- 
sions the American people have about the 
German people, the German Government, and 
the American Government will cooperate to 



Looking and Trying 357 

conduct a campaign in America which will 
remove them. 

SECOND. ADVERTISING FACTS 
AWAY. 

There are certain accusations Americans 
make against the German people which 
are true and which the Germans would be 
glad to take steps not to have true the mo- 
ment these particular facts are advertised to 
them and brought home to them, and there 
are certain accusations German people make 
against the American people which are true 
and which the Americans would be glad to 
take steps not to have true the moment the 
facts are advertised to them and brought home 
to them. 

THIRD. ADVERTISING MUTUAL 
INTERESTS. 

Advertising to have experiments and re- 
searches made to find out what the mutual in- 
terests are and then advertising to let every- 
body in both nations concerned, know them 
feel them and act on them. 



358 The Air -Line to Liberty 

FOURTH. ADVERTISING INTER- 
NATIONAL DISCOVERIES AND EX- 
PERIMENTS. 

Many of the accusations the American peo- 
ple make against the German people are partly 
wrong and partly right and only by mutual 
experimenting and advertising can each side 
find out — sometimes by asserting and holding 
out and sometimes by giving way and some- 
times by experimenting on new common 
ground. 

With two huge advertising campaigns like 
this, a kind of colossal conversation between 
two nations, both peoples will finally be able 
to come to a conclusion which neither could 
have come to alone, a conclusion which the 
people of two nations all at work on it, per- 
sonally, individually, and nationally, create 
together. Peace brought to pass or main- 
tained in this way would be a matter-of-fact 
substantial process. The peace would not 
need a treaty except as a bit of bookkeeping. 
The treaty would be in the act itself, a great 
mutual, daily, international act of creative 
imagination. 



Chapter IV 359 

LISTENING 

EVEN the people who do not want Amer- 
ica to use advertising, and who do not 
believe in advertising, they will advertise that 
they do not believe in advertising. They will 
advertise that advertising does not work. 

If they do not want America to advertise 
war away they will advertise to America to 
keep it from advertising war away. 

If there is any substitute for advertising that 
any of us would like to propose and would 
like to get for all nations, we cannot get it 
for all nations without advertising it in all na- 
tions. And only advertising it in all nations 
can make it work. 

If up over the hurry of the presses now 
printing the first words of this book while I 
write the last, new events are coming to us 
that shall change the focus and jerk away all 
the whole foreground of the vision of the 
world, as has happened before, the faith in this 
book comes out to meet them. Whatever hap- 
pens or may happen from this day on in the 



360 The Air-Line to Liberty 

war, the world is heaping up truth on what I 
have but begun to say. 

If what comes to-morrow proves to be war 
and more and harder war, nothing but adver- 
tising can pull us together to win the war, and 
nothing but advertising can make winning the 
war mean anything when we win it. 

Or if as it turns out when these words ap- 
pear, there is peace, nothing but advertising 
will make peace mean anything, nothing but 
advertising can determine in the hearts of the 
people what the peace shall be, or keep peace 
from being worse than war. 

Nothing but advertising can keep the na- 
tions when peace comes, from throwing the 
war away. The last stupendous chance of 
men to live with God, all the dying and the 
singing and the hope in it, the sacramental 
cup — the sacrifice of the blood of five million 
dead men lifted high before the altar, at the 
last moment dashed from our hands . . . shall 
slip away from us . . . slip away from our 
children and children's children forever — 
and dribble through the floor of the world. 



Chapter V 361 

A BILLION DOLLARS' WORTH OF LISTENING 

RIGHTLY prepared and rightly placed 
we could win this war in a week, with 
one billion dollars' worth of listening. 

We could install arrangements that would 
insure the world against war forever with two 
billion dollars' worth of listening. 

After that, when the idea has been started 
and when two or three great or listening na- 
tions have been set going and any one can see 
what listening in a nation does for it, all na- 
tions small and great will listen eagerly for 
nothing. 

In asking my people to arrange with the 
nations to get and to get at once three billion 
dollars' worth of listening, I am asking them 
to foot quite a bill. But the three billion dol- 
lars, we would spend with the other nations 
spread over a year, would be cheap — for what 
we would get. We would be getting for our- 
selves and for the other nations something we 
want to get, for three billion dollars a year. 

We are paying out now — for what we are 
getting now — a billion dollars a week. 



362 Chapter VI 

THE PRESIDENT, THE PEOPLE AND THE WORLD 
Introduction 

THE important part of an idea is what 
people do with it. I have put the word 
Introduction at the top of this page because it 
is here that the introduction that is merely by 
the author ends and the introduction by the 
reader begins. 

I have written an opening paragraph on the 
general idea of stopping all wars and winning 
this one by advertising to the Germans as 
America's substitute for war. 

My first notion of what to do with this idea 
was to cut across with it at once to some who 
could act, who could make it over into what 
it should be, finish it and use it. I thought 
that the thing for me to do with it was to go 
down to Washington at once, knock on the 
door of the White House with it and place it 
in the hands of the President. 

Then it occurred to me how lonely and un- 
important the idea looked, and how much 
better it would be, and on the whole more po- 
lite to the President as well as more modest 



Introduction 363 

to knock on the door of the White House 
with ten million people (readers of The Sat- 
urday Evening Post) and ask Mr. Tumulty 
to tell the President that ten million people 
were waiting at the door and wanted him to 
ask the President if the President could talk 
with them a minute. 

Of course I cannot say that the ten million 
people who read the Post (five to a number) 
will agree with me, but if the ten million peo- 
ple are found to want what I want, and will 
mention it to ten million more and will call 
the attention of twenty thousand editors to 
what we want, and will have it discussed be- 
fore the country, raising the money, the men 
and the airplanes we will have to have and 
finding and getting ready the stuffing for the 
bombs will be under way and the main lack 
in my programme, namely, provision for the 
backing of a President in carrying it out, 
will have been removed. The full under- 
standing, the full power of the people will be 
placed in the President's hands and the suc- 
cess of America in winning all war by adver- 
tising a substitute for it, will be assured. 



364 The Air-Line to Liberty 

It has seemed to me that this kind of pro- 
gramme for America is one which in a very 
singular degree goes with the kind of Presi- 
dent we have. 

No statesman the world has known could 
be more close by temperament, by skill and by 
practice, to seeing, conceiving and carrying 
through such a programme. It is a pro- 
gramme that would not be possible without 
him. Only a man who is in the habit of see- 
ing and in the habit of taking with his own 
nation and with other nations a masterful — 
a spiritually highhanded course, could hope 
to bring this war and all wars to a full stop 
with religion with one sheer amazing world- 
wide feat of listening and advertising. 

At all events it is what would be religion to 
me — the touching the imagination of a great 
nation and the waking the solar plexus of a 
world. 

No living man could at this moment — like 
Woodrow Wilson, save a world by plumbing 
the sub-conscious depth of the human heart, 
by invoking God, by advertising throughout 



Introduction 365 

the earth the prayers and the wills of a great 
people. 

No man sees as Woodrow Wilson sees the 
material possibilities of organizing the atten- 
tion of a nation, of massing the vision and the 
will of a people. 

But a great President cannot be a great 
President all alone. I invoke for him the 
faces I have seen in the streets. I invoke for 
him the spirit of great cities, of the skyscrap- 
ers, of the high mountains, of the mighty 
prairies and rivers, of the strong patient quiet 
fields stored in the hearts of my people. 

If the World Department I have in mind is 
to do its work and if the billion dollars' 
worth of listening with which we propose to 
end the war, is to be arranged for, the Presi- 
dent will need to feel a hundred million peo- 
ple behind him. 

The present Committee of Public Informa- 
tion which the President has established is the 
best emergency arrangement in the direction 
of the World Department which the Presi- 
dent could make without stopping to explain 
to the people, without asking them to help 



366 The Air-Line to Liberty 

and with only such money as he could take out 
of his own private purse for special expenses. 

When Mr. Creel was asked the other day 
how much money he wanted a year to carry 
out what his conception of what his Publicity 
Committee should do, in this and other coun- 
tries, he said twenty-five millions would do. 
For such a World Department as I have in 
mind, if it were properly backed by the peo- 
ple, the President would have to plan for a 
very different scale of expenditure. 

I would want ten dollars apiece a year from 
every inhabitant of America from babies up, 
to mobilize the vision and the will of the peo- 
ple. Mr. Creel wants twenty-five cents 
apiece. Twenty-five cents apiece is all the 
President feels warranted in having taken 
from the pockets of the people, for vision, for 
mobilizing and massing and throwing upon 
the fate of the world, the prayers and the wills 
of the people. 

I do not believe that this will be true very 
long. 

I believe that the moment the people have 
had pointed out to them what America could 



Introduction 367 

do just at this juncture toward winning the 
war and ending all war, with a billion dollars' 
worth of listening in Germany, the President 
will feel backed up in taking — for such lis- 
tening as he alone in the world could arrange 
for, all the money he wants. 

A thousand years ago when this last four 
years began I could pray under the roof of a 
church. 

A bell in a steeple called me and when I 
prayed I knew I prayed. 

Now I never know. 

Whatever I do, whatever I say or keep 
from saying I remember afterwards that it 
was praying — it must have been praying. 
And always with these crowds of people 
round me. 

I look at the stars and see trenches. 

I look at flowers — at beautiful women eat- 
ing and laughing in windows. And I see 
hungry cities. I see nations lifting their 
hands. 

And in a wide empty place. 



368 The Air-Line to Liberty 

And people near by seem so far off. They 
go by like pictures. 

They are far away though I touch them. 

And all the funny little people in the great 
wide empty place go by with all their neat 
little religions — their cunning cathedrals. 

The sky is so near — the sky and the trenches. 

Why should I look at the roses in the win- 
dow? 

I have heard great cities crying like little 
children in the night. 

All their religions and other playthings 
seem taken from them. 

The nave of the world is stripped away and 
the nations are alone with God. 

When I think of the spiritual forces of the 
world fronted up in a great listening and ad- 
vertising machine against the Germans, I 
think of the way Isaiah put it once: 

Behold I will make thee a new sharp thresh- 
ing instrument having teeth. Thou shalt 
thresh the mountains and beat them small and 
shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan, 
and the wind shall carry them away. . . . 



Introduction 369 

I come down to breakfast in my hotel. 
Glad things throng around me, laughing 
voices, sereneness. The sun shines in the 
great windows ... the hovering waiter 
. . . and the white cloths and the silver . . . 
and I take up my paper a second and sud- 
denly around the corner of a paragraph I 
want to pray! I want to pray in the middle 
of the front page of the New York Times! 

Out of the middle of that mighty street of 
the thoughts of men, where, silent invisible in- 
numerable, the faces and footsteps of all man- 
kind seem going past, my soul cries out, Oh 
God, Oh God! . . . and my waiter asks me 
if he shall open my eggs. . . . 

I had never thought until this war that 
praying could be quite like this before. 
Sometimes the prayers are not to God and I 
will see a faraway sky around me and hear 
the hum of airplanes through the clouds: 
"Oh Germans, listen to us! A hundred mil- 
lion Americans from over the sea, from out 
of the sky, we hover over you! We and our 
airplanes cry to you! Above the smoke of 
your chimneys, above your mighty cities, and 



370 The Air-Line to Liberty 

above the still spaces of your fields we speak 
to you — from over the sea, from out of the 
sky! From out of the years that have been 
swept away in death, from out of the years 
that reach ahead, in the name of our fathers 
and your fathers and your children and our 
children we speak to you! to you! oh sons of 
Goethe and Schiller!" 



Note 

This book is written to meet a national 
emergency and it is written in an emergency 
style. It does not seem as if I can bear (the 
reader may see it between the lines) to leave 
my idea alone with him. And yet it does not 
seem as if I could bear any longer the un- 
speakable loneliness of believing it and not 
seeing it in action and not finding out if the 
world does not believe it too. Here it is. God 
helping me, what I have written I have 
written ! 



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